When Bihar votes later this year, one of the election’s compelling imponderables will find an answer — whether poll strategist turned power aspirant Prashant Kishor of Jan Suraaj will emerge as a force to reckon with or whether he will find himself overwhelmed by the two leaders who have straddled the state’s politics like monoliths for over three decades.
Since 1995, the Bihar elections have been a contest between Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar — each representing his own configuration of caste and communities. The only exception was the 2015 Assembly elections where the RJD and JDU stalwarts had joined hands, only for Nitish to walk out of the Mahagathbandhan two years later and re-embrace the BJP.
Anyone trying to break this pattern of power swinging between Lalu and Nitish has been termed “vote katwa (splitter)” by leaders of both combinations.
In 2020, Pushpa Priya Choudhary of the Plurals Party marketed herself as the chief ministerial candidate through front-page ads in newspapers, but did not win a single seat.
This time, it is Prashant Kishor who has plunged lock, stock and barrel into the electoral battle. However, PK is no Pushpa Priya. “Let them call me vote katwa, I will slice votes away from both the alliances and my candidates will win,” PK said while campaigning in Muslim-dominated Araria in the Seemanchal region. He urged Muslims not to waste their votes on the RJD.
Caste equations
Bihar’s political pundits doubt PK’s claim of being an influential player.
“Jan Suraaj is like a new version of the Aam Aadmi Party. But unlike the AAP in Delhi, Jan Suraaj will have to face strong caste-oriented politics,” former Patna University professor N.K. Choudhary said.
“Both the NDA and the INDIA bloc have strong bases in Bihar and I doubt Prashant Kishor will be able to slice away votes from these groupings. Although there are sections of society that are attracted to Jan Suraaj, PK may not win seats this time. But he will leave footprints. He can build his organisation for the 2030 polls.”
The Mahagathbandhan, steered by the RJD, is banking on the party’s core base among Muslims, Yadavs and a section of Dalits. The NDA has traditionally received the support of the upper castes, non-Yadav OBCs and the Economically Backward Classes (EBCs).
Numbers game
Jan Suraaj made its foray into electoral politics in the November 2024 Assembly by-elections to four seats, and lost from all. The NDA won all four.
The Jan Suraaj candidates in Imamganj and Belaganj did make a mark, bagging 35,000 and 18,000 votes, respectively. This lent credence to the argument that the party could indeed eat into the votes of the entrenched players and disrupt their well-laid plans.
Jan Suraaj had claimed to have obtained 10 per cent of the popular vote.
“If this percentage holds in the Assembly polls, both the RJD and the NDA have reason to worry,” a BJP leader said, preferring anonymity.
“In the 2020 elections, Chirag Paswan contested independently from around 140 of the 243 seats. His party won just one seat and got 5.6 per cent of the votes. This led to the defeat of NDA candidates in over 40 seats and reduced the JDU to just 43 seats although it contested 115.”
In a C-Voter survey this month, 22 per cent of respondents chose PK as their preferred candidate for chiefminister, second only to Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD and ahead of Nitish, Chirag and Samrat Choudhary of theBJP. Seen in conjunction with two earlier legs of the survey in February and June, PK is the only candidate whose stocks have risen consistently.
Game plan
When PK undertook his Jan Suraaj Yatra three years ago, he rarely attacked the BJP, focusing instead on Nitish and Tejashwi. But lately, he has been targeting state BJP leaders — Bihar unit president Dilip Jaiswal, health minister Mangal Pandey and the party’s chief ministerial face, Samrat — over allegations of corruption.
The game plan suggests that PK now believes he may be able to win over more voters from the NDA than the RJD-Congress combine.
Outlining his ticket distribution plans a year ago, PK had said he would allot 40 seats to Muslims, 40 to women and the remaining according to caste ratios.
Unlike the Mahagathbandhan and the NDA, Jan Suraaj has no well-demarcated caste or community backing.
“We do not play caste politics, but we believe that every caste has deserving candidates,” said Kishore Kumar Muna, former MLA and general secretary of Jan Suraaj.
Jan Suraaj insiders said they were fielding candidates who could corner 10,000 to 50,000 votes in each of the 243 constituencies.
The plan appears to be to get relatives of established politicians to join the party.
The son of the late BJP parliamentarian Lalmani Choube, the granddaughter of the late Karpoori Thakur, and sons of former Seohar MP Anwarul Haque and late Congress MLA Ramdev Rai are among those to have joined Jan Suraaj.
In the past six months, Jan Suraaj has shed its distrust of traditional politicians. BJP leader and former Purnea MP Uday Singh and one-time Nitish aide and former Union minister R.C.P. Singh have switched to the party.
A recent internal survey of the BJP is said to have given the NDA an edge of 10 per cent over the Mahagathbandhan, but there are signs that a section of upper caste voters may be gravitating towards Jan Suraaj. Officially, the BJP has denied any such shift.
“Even Independents get 5,000 votes in Assembly polls, the same will be the condition of the Jan Suraaj candidates,” a BJP spokesperson said.
The RJD, after initially describing Jan Suraaj as a BJP plant, has gone silent.
Both the BJP and the RJD are trying to ignore Jan Suraaj, stressing the importance of caste combinations in Bihar politics. It’s now for PK to prove the well-established formula wrong.