For a man who engineered other people’s electoral victories, Prashant Kishor was conspicuously absent from the poll results, whether he was a winner or a loser. With a by-poll expected to be held in Bihar anytime now, this may be about to change, though PK is keeping people guessing so far.
The poll strategist-turned-founder of the Jan Suraj Party (JSP) said on Saturday that his party has decided “in principle” to contest the upcoming by-election on the Bankipore assembly seat in Patna, vacated by BJP’s Nitin Nabin after he was elected to the Rajya Sabha and elevated to the post of party’s national president in January.
When Kishor was pointedly asked if he would be the candidate himself, he offered a phrase he has 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.
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.
“We just need a strong filter.”
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.
“[The bypol] It will be held by the time the NDA has completed seven to eight months in power. “So the by-poll will be a referendum on the first year of government.”
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.
PK’s big moves since the big defeat
In the wake of the defeat, the party, technically led by Uday Singh with the PKR as de facto supreme ruler, dissolved all its organizational units from the panchayat level upwards.
Kishor observed a silent fast at the Bhitiharwa Ashram in West Champaran, established by Mahatma Gandhi a century ago, the same place where he launched his 3,500-km padayatra three years ago when he entered politics full-time after a short stint as vice president under Nitish.
More recently, the PKR announced a longer-term withdrawal, moving to an ashram on the outskirts of Patna, declaring it its primary base of operations until the RJD firmly establishes its presence before the next Bihar assembly elections scheduled for 2030.
The move also raised questions over his rift with JSP national president Uday Singh, who vacated his Patna residence, Kishore, before shifting to the ashram. Uday Singh has since announced a “one-year break from active politics”.
Prasjant Kishor denied any disagreement and told reporters: “Uday Singh is like a brother to me, besides being a prominent party colleague. We respect his wish to take a break.” Uday Singh had earlier said that the reason behind the massive majority achieved by the BJP-led NDA “is the government’s distribution of funds”.
But Kishore has made other moves that raise more questions about his future plans. The recent visit to Mumbai of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Sunetra Pawar – who was once an advisor to her late husband Ajit Pawar-led NCP – has sparked speculation about a return to consultancy. Parth Pawar, Sunetra’s son, explained on social media that Kishore is “like a brother” and the visit was a personal lunch with no political angles.
Earlier during the assembly elections in late 2025, Kishor had said that he did not contest the assembly elections himself because “the party felt that I should focus on organizational work”.
Bypolls in Bankipur must be held within six months of the seat becoming vacant, as per the law. Nabin resigned at the end of March.
