Prashant Kishor: Man behind many leaders’ electoral success bites dust in own fight

Before launching into the Bihar Assembly election, the celebrated former poll strategist Prashant Kishor had made two predictions, one about his Jan Suraaj Party and the other about the JD(U), of which he is a former national vice president.

His prediction of “arsh par ya farsh par” (either sky high or down to dust) for his own party has, much to his chagrin, came true, though JD(U) cadres, including its supreme leader Nitish Kumar, the Bihar Chief Minister, may ridicule him for the forecast that the party will win “not more than 25 seats”.

JD(U)’s tally seems tipped to cross 80, its best performance since 2010 when the party had crossed the three-digit mark, while contesting a much larger number of seats compared with the 101 it did this time.

Kishor, on his part, has his task cut out. His party, which had tried to contest all 243 seats on its own and blamed top BJP leaders like Union Home Minister Amit Shah for the failure of some of its candidates to turn up for filing of nomination papers, has failed to open its account.

In most of the seats, Jan Suraaj Party candidates seem likely to forfeit their deposits.

The 47-year-old had launched the party, with much fanfare, about a year ago, after a “pada yatra” that saw him marching across the length and breadth of Bihar over several months.

Although Kishor is often pilloried for having wrongly predicted that BJP was likely to cross the 300-mark in the Lok Sabha election a year ago, he has always maintained that in a country where a large section of the population is barely able to keep body and soul together, there shall always remain a space for the Opposition.

“It is not the Opposition, but the parties in the opposition, which are weak in this country”, has been one of the most insightful remarks made by the IPAC founder, whose prowess as a poll strategist has benefitted leaders of as diverse hues as Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, Jagan Mohan Reddy, Uddhav Thackeray and MK Stalin.

Not all his assignments, in his previous avatar, have resulted in success for his clients, a fact which, according to his critics, Kishor does not like to admit.

With age very much on his side and the opposition INDIA bloc having been battered in Bihar, there is a virgin territory for Kishor and his Jan Suraaj Party to explore.

But the Jan Suraaj Party is not the first party in which he was active as a leader. His prowess in managing elections had endeared him to Nitish Kumar, who, after returning as Chief Minister in 2015, appointed him as an advisor with the rank of a cabinet minister.

Three years later, he joined JD(U) and quickly became the party’s national vice president, triggering speculations that Kumar saw in him a successor to his own legacy.

However, just over a year later, Kishor was ousted for openly lambasting Kumar’s equivocal stand on the Citizenship Amendment Act, which had evoked protests in several parts of the country.

Soon after his expulsion, Kishor announced the launch of an amorphous campaign, “Baat Bihar Ki”, which was a non-starter.

After earning plaudits for handling the immensely successful campaign of Mamata Banerjee who in 2021 returned as West Bengal CM for a third term, Kishor toyed with the idea of “reviving” the Congress by sharing a blueprint with the top leadership of the grand old party. However, the deal never materialised.