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In Prashant Kishor’s win, BJP’s moment of reckoning

The Bankipur bypoll, a personal setback for both BJP national president Nitin Nabin as well as Bihar CM Samrat Choudhary, may indicate a churn beyond Bihar.

Jan Suraaj Party chief Prashant Kishor celebrates with supporters. (@jansuraajonline/X/Enhanced using AI)

8 min readNew DelhiAug 7, 2026 08:31 AM IST First published on: Aug 7, 2026 at 05:30 AM IST

Who could have imagined that within weeks of wresting West Bengal from Mamata Banerjee and splitting her Trinamool Congress (TMC) – and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena once again – and coming close to mustering a two thirds majority in Parliament to push through the constitutional amendment legislation linked to Delimitation Bill in the current Monsoon Session of Parliament, the BJP dispensation would “sacrifice” Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to placate protesting youths at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.

Similarly, who would have thought that eight months after sweeping the Bihar Assembly elections and going on to install a BJP Chief Minister on the Pataliputra gaddi for the first time, the BJP would be defeated in one of its most secure constituencies in the state, which it held for over three decades.

The point remains that in every state the bypolls are usually a cakewalk for its ruling party. In this case, the BJP-led NDA had bagged as many as 202 seats in the 243-member House only last November. What is more, Bankipur has been known as a bastion of Nitin Nabin, the new BJP national president, who won the seat for five consecutive terms since 2006. Before Nabin, it was held by his late father Nabin Kishore Sinha from 1995 until his death in 2006. In fact, the bypoll was necessitated as Nabin vacated the seat – which he won by about 52,000 votes in the Assembly election – following his elevation as the BJP chief and his subsequent election to the Rajya Sabha earlier this year.

Bankipur was also the first electoral challenge that BJP CM Samrat Choudhary faced amid general expectations that he would pull out all stops to clinch it, especially since the main challenger, Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor, had made the contest a “referendum” on his leadership.

As a Kushwaha leader, Samrat was expected to bolster the Luv-Kush (Kurmi-Kushwaha) alliance put in place by his late father, the socialist leader Shakuni Choudhary, along with Nitish Kumar in the 1990s to counter the dominance of Yadavs among the OBC groups. Bankipur is thus a personal setback for both the BJP chief as well as the Bihar CM.

Beyond Bankipur

Bankipur saw dissatisfaction with the incumbent BJP, rejection of the principal Opposition RJD, and the mandate for debutant Prashant Kishor, the poll strategist-turned-politician, whose fledgling JSP had failed to open its account in the 2025 Bihar elections despite contesting 238 seats. But Bankipur may indicate a churn beyond Bihar, reflecting a changing mood in some other parts of the country too.

It can be tempting to overread such a situation. The BJP remains firmly in the saddle in Patna and still has about four-and-half-years left for its term and can also be expected to apply correctives.

Read | The ‘kutta-billi’ jibe that wasn’t: Ravi Shankar Prasad says he never made remark

Bankipur is not a typical Bihar constituency. While it is an out-and-out urban seat, earlier known as Patna West, it is also marked with historic landmarks like Gandhi Maidan which gave birth to many a political movement that not only shaped Bihar’s roadmap but also India’s sometime as seen in the mid-1970s during the JP movement.

Bankipur has represented the power of ideas, dominated as it is by educated, upper caste groups, particularly Kayasthas who are bureaucrats and professionals and would have been exercised by the recent NEET exam leak row.

Messages for BJP

For the BJP, the messages emanating from Bankipur are loud and clear. Several BJP leaders and NDA allies are already articulating, in private, what went wrong – that people have reacted against “arrogance of power” and wanted to give the party a jolt. The purported remark from the BJP camp that even a dog or cat “kutta-billi” fielded by the party would win from Bankipur was picked by Kishor as his war cry during his campaign.

Second, the Bankipur outcome could be a pointer that the BJP’s core support base, the upper castes, may be getting disenchanted with it. This was apparent earlier this year when sections of the upper caste groups were up in arms against the UGC equity norms in higher educational institutions, as they saw it as tilted in favour of the OBCs.

The Congress’s student wing NSUI then won the president’s post in the Patna University Students’ Union (PUSU) elections. The killing of 28-year-old social activist Bharat Tiwari in an alleged fake police encounter in Bhojpur sparked widespread outrage in the state. Most of all, the “chanda chori” in the funds donated to the Ram temple in Ayodhya made many Hindus unhappy, especially among the upper castes who had rallied behind the Ayodhya temple movement over the years.

There is also the Gen Z factor, although Kishor has underplayed it. Gen Z, which accounts for about 26% of India’s population, makes up over 29% of Bihar’s population. The youth agitation led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at Jantar Mantar has created a ripple effect in different parts of the country, leading to student protests across Bihar, where the use of an AK-47 gun by police for firing on protesters set off a storm.

PK factor

And then, there is Prashant Kishor, popularly known as PK. The backroom strategist who had played a role in the victory of Narendra Modi in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and of regional heavyweights like Nitish, Captain Amarinder Singh, Mamata, Jagan Mohan Reddy, among other satraps, decided to take the plunge into the electoral arena himself this time. Before launching the JSP on October 2, 2024, he had undertaken a two-year padyatra across Bihar.

Perhaps there was unease among some Bankipur voters over the JSP’s rout in the 2025 elections despite Kishor’s efforts to focus on education, jobs and migration and rise above caste and communal politics. He also put in a lot of hard work on the ground, canvassing from door to door, telling common people, “Your vote is precious and you can make a difference to your child’s future”, which struck a chord. Many of the younger Yadavs also viewed PK with favour than the RJD and state Leader of Opposition Tejashawi Yadav should worry about that.

Even though he will be a lone JSP MLA, Kishor is expected to take up important issues in the House, keeping the NDA government on its toes, while building his party for the 2030 Assembly polls.

Bankipur marks the end of the Nitish era in Bihar. Would Kishor have emerged as Nitish’s successor had the two not fallen out? The JD(U) chief might have initially seen him in that light. Today, with Nitish having shifted to the Rajya Sabha amid health issues, the JD(U) seems to be in disarray.

There were reports that many Kurmis in Bankipur, unhappy with Nitish’s exit as the CM, had opted for PK. Significantly, barely a day after the Bankipur results, the PM was photographed with Nitish in Parliament.

Bankipur has shown that the social coalition of upper castes and OBCs/EBCs (and of Mahadalits and Pasmanda Muslims) crafted by Nitish, which fuelled the BJP-JD(U) alliance’s repeated wins, may have frayed now.

This may lead to new alignments and emergence of new faces among whom Kishor is the most prominent “chehra”. The BJP can be expected to go all out to field young candidates in the coming elections. A new leadership may come up not necessarily through protracted socio-political struggles like in the past, but through movements driven primarily on social media on platforms like Instagram. This was seen in the CJP’s case that gained a national visibility in just a few weeks – a phenomenon unimaginable in the past. We are entering a new political era, and Bankipur may be a symbol of that change.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide.)