Inside Prashant Kishor's Political Strategy For Bihar 2025

Over the last few months, political-strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor has received much attention in media.

However, this attention has come due to his background as a strategist who has helped various political parties, from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the Congress and the Trinamool Congress, during crucial elections.

He has recently been seen on television commenting on the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

What hasn't received much attention, however, is his Jan Suraaj campaign in Bihar. There has been little to no emphasis on the political strategy that Kishor is adopting for the 2025 assembly elections in Bihar.

Jan Suraaj Campaign

Inspired by various yatras shaping India’s politics through the last few decades, Kishor has also begun his political journey with a yatra. His padyatra began on 2 October 2022 from Mahatma Gandhi’s Bhitiharwa Ashram in West Champaran district of Bihar.

Kishor is stopping in villages and towns, holding mini rallies on the way and holding conversations with various kinds of groups, panchayat members and mukhiyas.

One peculiar aspect of Kishor’s addresses in these rallies and conversations is that he is not making diplomatically-worded appeals for votes. Instead, he is often seen rebuking people for their political choices made during the last few decades.

In his interactions, Kishor frequently asks people to vote with the future of their children in mind and not based on caste allegiances, which he says haven't delivered.

What He Wants To Achieve

In one of the interviews with The Print, Kishor admits that it is a long-term strategy.

His outreach to the public mainly focuses on telling them that identity politics is not the solution for their problems. Once that part is done, Kishor will convince like-minded people to form a political party with the sole agenda of developing Bihar.

Admittedly, Kishor wants to provide background support to that political party. This seems to be an attempt to mask his ambition, which, at least in the medium to long term, is to lead a party in Bihar with a sizeable chunk of votes.

For this strategy to fructify, the Jan Suraaj campaign team is on the ground to establish connections and goodwill among common people. The campaign team, headed by Kishor, consists of thousands of young professionals, many of whom have quit their jobs to work with him in Bihar. A panchayat is allotted to a specific team, and this team is asked to devise a plan for bettering the area.

The team does its research, engages in door-to-door conversation, asks people about the availability of basic amenities, and notes down the problems. It then corroborates with the arrangements done by governments and notes down the fault lines. It is on the basis of these fault lines that the team devises a developmental plan for the panchayat.

Kishor says that similar plans will be devised for all 8,500 panchayats in the state, and then they will be shared with local people for further discussions.

A New Narrative In State Politics

Just like his speeches in Bihar, Kishor has come down heavily on caste politics in his interviews. His core belief is that caste politics has done nothing but harm to the people of Bihar by putting fear in the minds of people and pitting one caste against another.

On minority vote, he said that political parties create the fear of the BJP in the minds of Muslims to garner their support.

This, experts believe, is an attempt to break the traditional caste and community-based vote banks that the parties like the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) have in the state.

At the same time, he seems to be especially critical of the BJP and downplays its possible rise in Bihar politics.

In an interview with India Today, Kishor boasted how a Member of Legislative Council (MLC) candidate supported by him beat the BJP in Champaran, a strong fortress of the saffron party. According to Kishor, BJP’s wins in Bihar are mainly attributed to the Narendra Modi and TINA (there is no alternative) factors.

He has criticised RJD and JDU in similar veins.

One party which he didn’t seem to be too critical of is Congress. This, however, should not be a surprise given it was only some time ago that he was considering to work with the Congress and help the party revive its political fortunes. During his interview with India Today in December 2023, Kishor termed Congress as closest to his ideological inclination and didn’t deny the prospects of working with the party.

Jan Suraaj is reportedly planning to field 75 candidates from the extremely backward castes in the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections.