Newbie Jan Suraaj Party falters in Bihar Assembly elections

The poor showing by newbie political outfit Jan Suraaj Party (JSP), led by Prashant Kishor, was one of the major outcomes of the Bihar Assembly elections, with the party failing to register a single victory.

Launched with great hype and on the back of a three-year mass contact programme, the JSP was considered one of the big unknowables of the election. Who the party would hurt, and to what degree, was a matter of speculation throughout the elections. Mr. Kishor’s aggressive press conferences and allegations against senior leaders of both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) constituents and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) were a talking point.

The JSP fielded 234 candidates for the 243-member Bihar Assembly, but according to sources, the decision by Mr. Kishor to not contest the polls himself took the momentum out of the campaign.

Political scientist Ashwani Kumar, however, has a different assessment. “He failed to read Bihar, which is surprising considering he was by Nitish Kumar’s side in 2015, when the Mahagathbandhan trounced the NDA,” he said, adding that new political formations largely succeed when they emerge on the back of a people’s movement and a cadre-based support structure.

“What we saw with Prashant Kishor was, as the Americans put it, astro turf politics. He lacked the art of the possible, when compared to the work of someone like Nitish Kumar, who created the Extremely Backward Classes (EBC) vote bank from the larger Mandal challenge,” Professor Kumar said.

This failure to meet the challenge of Mr. Nitish Kumar’s cultivation of the EBC support base was also a cause for the failure of the Vikassheel Insan Party (VIP), according to him.