As long shadows of the dusk descended on a sprawling Sheikhpura house in Patna on 6 November, the day Bihar voted in the first phase, the mood in a large room with TV sets was sombre. It belonged to Uday Singh, an ex-Purnia MP. It’s the headquarters of Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party (JSP). Singh is its first national president. TV channels were flashing around 55 per cent voter turnout by then and that dampened the mood here. If the turnout was to be low, that would mean the failure of Prashant Kishor’s three-year long ‘crusade’ to awaken and galvanise the people, especially migrants and their families.
About 7.2 per cent of the estimated Bihar population of 13 crore people are migrants — around 93 lakh. As per PK’s assessment, about 50 lakh migrants visited their native places during Chhath and stayed back for voting. He was counting on them to influence the voting choices of their family members, too. Even if only the parents and the wife of a migrant vote for the JSP, it comes to 2 crore votes for the party. It’s a winning number. The NDA secured 1.57 crore votes to win the Assembly election in 2020.
No wonder, PK’s campaign revolved around migrants with his main promise being that after 14 November, these migrants won’t have to leave their families in Bihar for just Rs 10,000-12,000 per month. One song that played on the loudspeakers during his campaign also talked about PK’s return home, subtly feeding into the migration narrative: “Sab kuchh apna chhod ke aayaa yeh Bihar ka beta hai, Jan Suraaj ka Prashant Kishor jan, jan ka chaheta hai (Bihar’s son left everything behind to come; Prashant Kishor of Jan Suraaj is everyone’s darling).”
It was in this backdrop that the apprehension of a low turnout in the first phase rattled JSP leaders. “If even the migrants and educated people in Patna haven’t come out to vote, it’s very disappointing,” Manoj Bharti, Bihar JSP president, told me. A 1988–batch Indian Foreign Service officer, Bharti’s last posting was as Indian’s Ambassador to Indonesia. After retiring in March 2023, he was living in Noida when Prashant Kishor’s interviews got him interested.
Bharti always wanted to do something for Bihar and he found his calling in PK’s politics. For the Madhubani-born ex-IITian diplomat, the low turnout seemed to threaten his belief in alternative politics. It was to last for a very short time, though. It was soon clear that the average turnout in those 121 constituencies (in the first phase) was the highest ever at 65.08 per cent, 7.79 percent more than the average turnout in the 2020 Assembly election. It came as a big relief to PK and his party colleagues.
Results aside, PK has arrived
Whatever may happen on 14 November, when the results are out, PK, the politician, has already arrived in Bihar politics. He is different from PK, the famed poll strategist. For one, he doesn’t rely on surveys to do his politics. Initially, as JSP functionaries tell me, he did collect data of around 1.6 crore people who matter at the local level—their political past, affiliations and inclinations. But that was used to draft people into the organisation — right from the booth level (with a 10-member team headed by a booth prabhari or in-charge) to the Assembly and district to state levels. The JSP has these teams ready in about 75,000 out of around 90,000 polling booths in the state. There is a 21-member team at the gram panchayat level, 51-member team at the block level, 151-member team at the sub-division level, and 251-member team at the district level.
Selection of JSP candidates is not based on surveys, as PK used to do for his clients earlier. It’s based on the feedback given by party leaders, including booth in-charges. I asked PK why he has given up on surveys as a politician which he as a strategist relied heavily on for his clients. He was almost nonchalant: “I told them that after all”. A leader should be able to read the pulse of the people, not the surveys. He or she shouldn’t need surveys to say who is the best candidate in a constituency. So, Prashant Kishor doesn’t do any surveys to get feedback about anything and anyone now. He is now a leader who already knows. Anyway, surveys are used by political bosses nowadays more to deny tickets to people they don’t want.
Unlike PK, the poll strategist, PK, the politician, has to do a lot more—right from being the party’s sole campaigner and face to running the organisation, planning and executing, fixing day-to-day issues, and even organising resources. PK would surely love to have a PK of his own to do these things for him.
Prashant Kishor is dismissive of those who write off him and his politics: “First they said, ‘who is PK’; then they said, ‘who will listen to him’; now they say ‘ok, he is a household name but will that translate into votes?’; they are in for a shock on 14 November.”
PK has certainly arrived in Bihar politics. Largely thanks to him, all established parties are on tenterhooks. It was evident from my interactions with NDA and Mahagathbandhan leaders last week. They ooze with confidence in public but admit in private that the election is “tight”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other top BJP leaders carefully skirted any mention of Prashant Kishor in their speeches; it would have made him look bigger than they would like him to be. It’s quite an achievement for a three-year-old politician to make everyone insecure.
Also read: Bihar’s Opposition parties are looking at migration the wrong way
Is Prashant Kishor Bihar’s Kejriwal?
That brings us to a question that political circles are abuzz with: Will he turn out to be the Arvind Kejriwal of Bihar? The Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party had stormed into Delhi politics, overthrowing the Congress in 2013 and becoming the numero uno until the BJP put it down last February. The comparison between PK and AK is valid to the extent that both were political newbies. Here is a key difference, though. The AAP was born out of a movement, like many other political startups in the past. Other such startups were either founded by dynasts or charismatic actors or were breakaways from established parties or byproducts of socio-political movements.
The few exceptions one may recall were Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra or Kanshi Ram in Uttar Pradesh who built their parties from scratch on their own. Prashant Kishor falls in this category. Only that his evolution as a politician has been much faster, thanks to his imaginative politics, experience as a poll strategist, and social media, of course. The AAP doesn’t fit in this category because it was an unintended progeny of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement supported indirectly by socio-cultural-political-ideological outfits ranged against the Congress. Kejriwal was a beneficiary, not a creator, of this movement. Prashant built his politics from scratch.
The AAP leader, however, becomes a subject of reference in PK’s context given their contemporaneity. Comparing the AAP in Delhi with the JSP in Bihar would be unfair. Socio-economic-political landscape of the national capital can’t be a reference point for the poorest, caste-obsessed state with barely 12 per cent urbanisation. If at all, the AAP in Punjab makes for a better analogy, given the state of joblessness, economic hardship, and sense of despair among the populace.
Kejriwal’s AAP emerged as a big force in Punjab in the 2017 Assembly election, securing 20 seats—five more than the runner-up Shiromani Akali Dal—and 23.7 per cent votes, just 1.5 percentage point less than the SAD. I covered that election. There was so much buzz about the AAP on the ground that even the formidable performance by the political newbie in Punjab looked much underwhelming. The AAP built on it to form the government in Punjab five years later. The buzz on the ground about Prashant Kishor’s JSP in Bihar is overwhelming—almost as audible and palpable as I felt in Punjab in 2017. PK says it will be arsh or farsh—either 0 or 150 in the 243-member Bihar Assembly. He is essentially saying that it won’t be like the AAP in Punjab in 2017.
Be that as it may, the comparison between PK and AK is inevitable. Both are self-made individuals, taking on the might of established parties. But the comparison ends right here. Kejriwal was a political parasite who gained his strength from Anna Hazare’s movement fostered by anti-Congress forces. He wasn’t encumbered by any ideology or belief system. He played to the gallery, feeding into and building on people’s disillusionment with the establishment then. The alternative politics he offered was vacuous, populist, and free of ideology and principles: you ask for the moon and I will give you.
As a JSP strategist put it, Kejriwal was in a hurry (to be in power) while Delhiites weren’t (as was evident from the fractured verdict in 2013 and Kejriwal’s decision to become the CM with the Congress’ support). People in Bihar are in a hurry but PK is not, said the JSP strategist, explaining that PK would not like to be a king with anyone’s support nor would he want to be a kingmaker. If there is a fractured verdict in Bihar, PK would rather force a re-election. While Kejriwal always played to the gallery promising the moon, PK has been ‘brutal’ in telling the people that they have to blame themselves for the misrule in Bihar and for the plight of their children and they themselves need to change first. Kejriwal could sleep with the enemy (Congress) for power, while PK is ready to wait for the next five years, if he has to.
No matter what the result on Friday, PK has shown how a common man can build a political party from scratch and set the electoral discourse. He is in no hurry. There is life beyond 14 November.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)