Opinion Prashant Kishor’s failure in Bihar shows why strategies cannot replace ‘sangathan’
If Kishor stays in Bihar, avoids the post-election lull that kills most political startups, builds local leadership and, crucially, contests himself, the party could matter by the decade’s end
The verdict is a reminder that you cannot shortcut the political labour that built Bihar’s earlier icons. For years, Prashant Kishor has repeated one line that should have framed expectations about his own political debut: Political consultants work on the margins. They optimise, they do not remake a landscape. Had interviewers and audiences taken that seriously, Jan Suraaj’s collapse in Bihar would have felt less like a shocking upset and more like a predictable outcome of mistaking marginal tools for central power.
This is not to say that consultants are dispensable. Kishor’s own success from 2014 shows how powerful a professionalised campaign can be for a party that already has a leader, a social base and a story that people recognise. Consultants are most effective when a party is strong enough to use their toolkit from a position of confidence. The margins matter only if the centre is already in place.
Jan Suraaj was his attempt to turn the margins into the centre. The verdict is a reminder that you cannot shortcut the political labour that built Bihar’s earlier icons. Karpoori Thakur, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan did not arrive fully formed. They were forged through decades of agitation, organisational work and compromise. Out of that history, Bihar developed a distinctive repertoire in which social, cultural and political life are densely entangled.
In Bihar, caste is not just a category in a survey. It is a language of dignity, grievance and aspiration. Humour, religious idioms, festivals, and even everyday slang feed into how politics is understood. Lalu Prasad’s candour, Nitish’s image as sushasan babu, Paswan’s positioning between Dalit assertion and coalition-making all drew from and reshaped this shared vocabulary. The political became personal, and the personal was always political.
Over the last five years and three major elections, the biggest profiteer of this ecosystem has been the BJP. It did not succeed by discarding Bihar’s repertoire. Instead, it entered it. It partnered and fought with Nitish Kumar, borrowed the idioms of social justice when useful, fused Hindutva with local caste arithmetic and, in the process, changed itself as well as the field.
Kishor often hovered outside Bihar’s political world. Fielding Karpoori Thakur’s granddaughter did not mean engaging with what Thakur embodied. His dislike for the tea-stall talk, where trust, signals and loyalties are patiently shaped, reveals the gap. He offered not an engagement but a replacement: Clean governance, jobs, education and an end to prohibition in exchange for leaving behind what he saw as stale caste and patronage politics. But replacing an ethos demands time, rootedness and, above all, movement, an andolan that can endure frustration and defeat, anchored in an idea that tells people why the new order is worth the risk.
Here lies the paradox. Kishor is deeply sceptical of both ideology and movements. He has often argued that the world has seen its worst leaders emerge from ideological certainties and that he prefers to stay above such affiliations. In a state and country where every successful party has grown out of some movement or moral frame, that scepticism leaves him trying to engineer rupture without the resources that normally sustain rupture.
Jan Suraaj’s campaign had many of the features that made Kishor famous as a strategist. The padyatra generated visibility. His team built a sleek digital operation, set up youth clubs and spoke insistently of education, migration and livelihoods. His own biography as a small-town upper caste boy from Buxar who made it to the UN, the Prime Minister’s Office and multiple war rooms resonated with younger Biharis who see migration as their main escape route.
Yet admiration did not become organisation. The party had no natural socioeconomic or cultural base, and most of its candidates were first-timers with little field experience. The padyatra created recognition, but not the sturdy booth-level committees needed to convert sympathy into votes. In 35 constituencies, Jan Suraaj’s vote count exceeded the victory margin. It mattered as a spoiler, not a contender. In effect, Kishor ended up helping Nitish, leaving him nearly ten seats stronger. In other words, Jan Suraaj looked more like a designed project; high on data, branding and leader visibility, thin on sangathan. Data can reveal opportunity; it cannot, on its own, supply political labour.
None of this means Jan Suraaj must remain a footnote. If Kishor stays in Bihar, avoids the post-election lull that kills most political startups, builds local leadership and, crucially, contests himself, the party could matter by the decade’s end. Bihar’s landscape is fluid, its voters open, its appetite for alternatives cautious but real. Kishor came, saw, walked and measured, but could not replace a political world built through labour with one designed on a laptop. For Jan Suraaj to rise, it must stop treating Bihar as a problem to fix and start accepting it as a history to work with.
The writer is a postdoctoral affiliate of Indian and Indonesian politics at KITLV-Leiden
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