One of India's most well-known political strategists, Prashant Kishor, was unable to get a single seat for his Jan Suraaj party in the pivotal Bihar state elections just last year. Many thought it was a dismal electoral debut and questioned whether he would run again.
Kishor has now made an unanticipated return. He is scheduled to take the oath of office as a lawmaker for the first time after winning a prominent by-election.
Many political watchers have been taken aback by the outcome. The result has reignited discussion about Kishor's political future and whether Jan Suraaj can become a significant force in Bihar, even though most warn that it is too soon to make generalizations from a single by-election.
In Bankipur, a seat that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had controlled since 1995, the 49-year-old defeated the party. Nitin Nabin, a former lawmaker who inherited the seat from his father, won it five times before stepping down earlier this year after being elected to the upper chamber of parliament.
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Kishor was regarded as the most in-demand strategist in Indian politics until recently. He contributed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's historic victory in the 2014 general election by proposing campaign strategies that were uncommon in India at the time, such as using holograms to beam the candidate into thousands of small gatherings.
However, he quickly lost favor with the BJP. He later joined the JD(U) as its vice-president under then-chief minister Nitish Kumar after helping to form the JD(U)-RJD alliance that beat the BJP in Bihar's 2015 assembly election.
However, another breakup was on the horizon.
Kishor left the JD(U) in 2020 due to the party's endorsement of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act, which was proposed by the federal government led by the BJP.
He was widely acknowledged for having assisted former chief minister Mamata Banerjee in defeating the BJP in the West Bengal state elections a year later; he claimed that this triumph would signal the end of his career as a political consultant. By that time, he had counseled political parties from all walks of life in India, including competitors.
Before starting the Jan Suraaj party in 2024, he and a small group of supporters set out on a months-long padyatra, or foot march, throughout Bihar in 2022.
Many dismissed Jan Suraj after he was unable to secure even one seat in the 2025 assembly election. His choice to run for Bankipur was viewed as risky. It worked out this time.
Similar in size to Portugal but with a larger population than the UK, Bihar is a politically significant state that sends 40 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament.
It struggles with high unemployment rates in part because of this. People have been migrating to other states for decades as a result of this. Biharis frequently work in low-paying manual labor occupations both domestically and internationally in industries like construction.
Since the beginning of his yatra, Kishor has prioritized both of these concerns. In this campaign, he too stuck to his fundamental message, but this time, Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary was his clear target.
He kept saying that Chaudhary wasn't qualified to solve Bihar's issues. Abhishek Kumar of the BJP and other competitors were mostly eclipsed by him, and he maintained the emphasis on personality over regional concerns by making the race a clear option between the two of them.
A third of Bankipur's voters are under 30, and the city is home to numerous colleges and exam-coaching facilities. This is also noteworthy because, only weeks before this vote, a government minister resigned due to the current surge of student demonstrations in India over jobs and exams.
Kishor has focused a lot of his campaign on youth unemployment and the need for many young people to leave the state in search of employment.
Even though it's only one seat and Indian politics has a history of protest movements failing to result in votes, this little outcome is being seen as an early indication that disgruntled young people would be willing to support a political outsider.
