Prashant Kishor prepares for re-entry into politics, lays out party’s leadership roadmap

While ruling himself out of the leadership race, Kishor made it clear that 25 applicants who are capable of bringing in 5,000 people each into the party fold can apply for the party president’s post. A seven-member empowered committee of Jan Suraaj, which was announced on Friday, would take the final call.

“There are five broad social groups: general category, OBCs (Other Backward Classes), EBCs (Extremely Backward Classes), SCs (Scheduled Castes), STs (Scheduled Tribes), and Muslims. As Dalits are the most disadvantaged, the first president of the new party will come from this section. We have also decided on giving rotational representation, which means the tenure of the president would be for a year. Either an EBC or a Muslim will be our second president, followed by a candidate from the OBC and general category. The idea is to give representation to all sections in the five-year electoral term,” he said.

The empowered committee comprises Dr Bhupendra Yadav from Samastipur, R N Singh from Begusarai, former IAS officer Suresh Sharma, lawyer Ganesh Ram from Siwan, Dr Manjar Naseen from East Champaran, former IAS officer Arvind Singh from Bhojpur, and Swarnlata Sahani from Muzaffarpur.

Kishor said currently the delegates were undecided between Class 10 and 12 as the minimum qualification for the party chief’s post. “(RJD supremo) Lalu and (Bihar Chief Minister) Nitish Kumar have left the state full of illiterates and hence we cannot have ‘graduate’ as the minimum qualification for our party president’s post,” he said.

The Jan Suraaj founder said his outfit too plays politics along the caste lines but with the approach of giving proportional representation to all. “We are not thinking along the lines that Yadavs vote for Lalu and Koeris and Kurmis vote for Nitish. If Yadavs are about 15%, we will field candidates as per their population irrespective of the result. As EBCs make up around 36% of the state’s population, be rest assured that we will field around 70 candidates (from the community) in next year’s Assembly polls,” he said.

The former poll strategist received a shot in the arm as socialist icon and former Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur’s granddaughter Jagriti joined Jan Suraaj along with retired IPS officer Anand Mishra, who unsuccessfully contested the recent Lok Sabha polls as an Independent from Buxar, and former RJD MLC Rambali Singh Chandravanshi.

While Jagriti is making her political debut, her father Dr Birendra Thakur is not associated with politics unlike her elder brother Ramnath Thakur who is a two-time Rajya Sabha MP and a Union Minister. Chandravanshi was recently expelled as an MLC for anti-party activities.

Even as people continued to join Kishore’s outfit, the mainstream parties in the state – RJD, JD(U) and RJD – dismissed Jan Suraaj. JD(U) chief spokesperson K C Tyagi said there was no space for new political players in the state more so because of the “well-defined social and political polarisation” in the state. “He has been with us before. He could hold meetings but will not be able to make inroads in Bihar. Making political strategy and doing politics are two different things,” Tyagi said.

The BJP, with whom Kishore had worked for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, welcomed his outfit’s impeding political entry. However, the party’s national spokesperson Guru Prakash Paswan said, “Bihar will become a centre of excellence with the Centre recently allocating a Rs 60,000-crore package. There has hardly been any political space in the state since the NDA became a dominant force in 2005.”

The RJD on the other hand called Kishor’s political entry a “threat to the democratisation of politics”. “They (technocrats) cannot create a conducive atmosphere for the alienated sections of society. Kishor is a tool in the hands of a few and will not go far with his ‘Bazaar canteen’ model of politics as it cannot provide new avenues to bring the alienated sections of society into the mainstream,” said RJD national spokesperson Subodh Kumar Mehta.