Poll strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor said his Jan Suraj Party (JSP) intends to contest the Bankipur Assembly seat in Patna. The seat is currently vacant after BJP leader Nitin Nabin was elected to the Rajya Sabha and was elevated to the post of party’s national president in January.
“Bankipur is the headquarters of the national president of the BJP. For the last 40 years, no party or leader has been able to defeat the BJP there… Since a BJP member became the chief minister for the first time, the by-elections will be a referendum on the promises made in November 2025,” he told news agency ANI.
“The public will have the right to cast their vote in relation to the promises made to them – whether they are promised to be delivered $2 lakh, promise to stop migration from Bihar, or commit to improving the education system and job opportunities. “Therefore, Jan Suraj believes that we should fight the Bankipur elections with full force,” he added.
He also spoke about the issue of NEET-UG paper leakage and said, “The problem of paper leakage is a systemic problem and not just an isolated incident. As long as coaching institutes dominate the education sector, paper leakage will continue.”
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Bankipur is the citadel of the BJP. Nabin, who first won the seat in the 2006 poll after his father’s death, retained it for a fifth consecutive term last year, defeating RJD candidate Rekha Kumari by a margin of nearly 52,000 votes and bagging 62.66% of the total vote share. The JSP team had fielded Vandana Kumari, a 37-year-old newbie from the business community, who finished a distant third.
Earlier, when asked if Prashant would be the candidate himself, Kishor offered a line he had used before, “It’s a decision the party has to take.” This was the answer he gave ahead of the Bihar Assembly elections in 2025, and he was not contesting at that time. But the political context is now starkly different.
However, Kishor is optimistic about Bankipore and claimed that only Jan Suraj’s party can defeat the BJP there.
“Our party believes that we just need to field a strong candidate. The RJD and Congress lost their seat by a large margin,” he told reporters in Patna on Saturday.
He saw the by-poll as a test case for the new BJP-JD(U) regime under the leadership of Samrat Chaudhary who recently replaced Nitish Kumar as chief minister.
In the 2025 elections in Bihar, the RJD contested 238 of the 243 Assembly seats and failed to win a single seat. Its total share of the vote was more than 3%. In many sectors, its candidates received fewer than NOTA votes, which means none of the above. Kishore had predicted the outcome in strict binary terms, repeatedly saying it would be either ‘arsh par ya frash par’, straight on top or flat on the ground.
