Opinion Prashant Kishor and the politics of dare: Win or lose, Bihar needs his political imagination

Bihar desperately needs new political imagination. Home to 130 million people — which would make it the world’s 11th-largest nation — the state has been locked in political stasis for three decades. The Lalu Prasad-Nitish Kumar duopoly delivered on their respective promises: Lalu gave voice to backward castes, Nitish improved infrastructure and law and order. Yet, Bihar remains India’s poorest state. When a state’s primary export becomes its own children, politics-as-usual becomes unconscionable.

Kishor brings something genuinely novel. His party has fielded unusual candidates — mathematicians who’ve authored textbooks, retired civil servants, social activists, even a transgender candidate — suggesting competence might matter more than caste arithmetic. The party’s symbol, a school bag, signals priorities transcending traditional identity politics — education as liberation, employment as dignity, governance as service rather than patronage.

His party’s bypoll performance last November was sobering — candidates lost deposits in three of four seats. He’s been dismissed as an urban elite creation, amplified by Delhi media but disconnected from rural Bihar’s realities. His promises of revolutionising education might seem fantastical where basic governance remains challenging. His past — helping architect the very political machines he now opposes — raises questions about authenticity.

Perhaps most tellingly, his aggressive body language and combative posturing alienates crucial constituencies — those sensitive to Bihar’s delicate caste equations, where his upper caste background already creates distance, and women voters who often prefer measured political conduct. Both Lalu and Nitish, for all their backroom management of strongmen politics, maintain genteel public personas that mesh with social realities.

Yet, dwelling on these critiques misses the larger significance of Kishor. Democracy requires periodic disruption to remain vital. Established parties need competition to sharpen their offerings. Voters deserve choices beyond familiar binaries. Even if Jan Suraaj wins no seats, its presence forces Bihar’s political establishment to confront uncomfortable questions about their staleness.

Consider what Kishor has achieved by entering the arena. His padyatra across 3,500 km of Bihar over two years created conversations about governance transcending caste mobilisation. His rallies drawing thousands suggest an appetite for political alternatives that established parties assumed didn’t exist. His policy proposals — lifting prohibition to fund education, universal elderly pensions, tackling low credit disbursement, generating employment — have injected substantive debate into what often becomes identity-based sloganeering.

International parallels are instructive. France’s Emmanuel Macron disrupted a decades-old left-right divide by creating a centrist alternative. Delhi’s Arvind Kejriwal proved governance-focused politics could defeat established machines. In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory demonstrates even entrenched systems can be toppled by outsiders articulating clear alternatives. These successes don’t mirror Kishor’s project exactly but validate attempts at democratic renewal.

More importantly, Kishor’s gamble challenges pernicious assumptions in Indian politics: Certain states are condemned to perpetual backwardness, that politics must remain trapped in caste calculations, that youth must accept migration as destiny. By articulating a different possibility — where Bihar’s children carry school bags instead of migrant bundles — he performs an essential democratic function of expanding political imagination. As V S Naipaul evocatively wrote, “we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

The entry costs for disrupting Indian politics are extraordinarily high. You need money, organisation, media attention, and courage to withstand character assassination. These barriers have grown steeper as meritocratic mobility within India’s dominant parties has suffered over the past decade. That Kishor assembled resources and survived the initial onslaught suggests barriers, while formidable, aren’t insurmountable. Future disruptors will learn from his successes and failures.

This isn’t about endorsing Kishor’s agenda or predicting electoral success. It’s recognising that democracy thrives when established orders face genuine challenges. Bihar’s voters deserve more than familiar faces trading power. They deserve politics that match their aspirations and offer concrete paths toward prosperity.

In a political culture that rewards cynicism and punishes idealism, Kishor’s gamble reminds us that change remains possible for those brave enough to attempt it. That alone makes his effort worthy of respect.

The writer is assistant professor of economics at Cornell University and co-author of Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future