We live in the Instagram reel age where a short, sharp sound-bite on video resonates far more than aerudite debate. Which might partly explain why on the counting day in Bihar a video clip of me blowing a whistle and remarking that Prashant Kishor has been brought down from ‘hero to zero’ instantly went viral. While the BJP-backed right wing ecosystem appeared to derive vicarious pleasure from the downfall of their one-time poster boy who played an important role in Narendra Modi’s successful 2014 prime ministerial campaign before pulling away, Kishor supporters were livid at the manner in which they felt I had trolled their leader.
While whistling in a TV studio was admittedly poor form, there was no malice intended at all. The political fortunes of the celebrated political consultant-turned-politician have been the subject of much media speculation for months and the Bihar voter has delivered a resounding verdict: the Jan Suraj Party ended up with zero seats and just 3.4% of the vote. The more legitimate question to be asked then is: Has Prashant Kishor proven to be a non-starter in the hurly-burly of electoral politics or is it premature to write him off?
Setting up a successful political start-up in India is incredibly hard. Only Arvind Kejriwal in recent times can claim to have achieved near-unicorn status by becoming Delhi chief minister within months of founding the Aam Aadmi Party and then fashioning a big win in Punjab. The victory in a relatively compact city-state like Delhi came on the back of the India Against Corruption movement while the Punjab triumph only revealed the complete frustration of the Sikhs with the existing options. But expansion hasn’t been easy and Kejriwal had found it difficult to sustain the early high valuation of his political stock.
In a previous era, N T Rama Rao rose meteorically in Andhra Pradesh but he was a charismatic film star in a part of the country where the lines between on and off screen imagery get easily blurred.
For Kishor, it was doubly hard because he was operating in a state like Bihar with its entrenched caste affiliations. That Kishor chose to walk the talk by criss-crossing the state for three years in an effort to build a party is admirable. He could, after all, have easily opted to carry on building upon an impressive (and highly lucrative) business model of strategizing some of the more successful election campaigns across parties.
Whether it was personal ambition, hubris or a risk-taking appetite, Kishor chose a path less taken. He had plenty of chutzpah, was remarkably media-savvy and very hard working but lacked the key to unlock the door to electoral success: converting visibility into votes.
Votes aren’t earned in the digital universe but through street credibility which, in turn, is built on trust and experience. The redoubtable Kanshi Ram, who founded the Bahujan Samaj Party, took years to make his mark in Indian politics. Kishor wanted to short-circuit the Kanshi Ram formula, relying on a massive social media outreach to create a buzz, especially amongst Bihar’s younger demographic. But while there was undeniable enthusiasm around Kishor, he didn’t have a distinct caste identity or a finely-tuned organisational set-up that could build on the initial excitement.
Like Kejriwal, Kishor was relying on a cadre of youthful volunteers to propel his Jan Suraj party forward. By pitching himself as an anti-establishment figure, he was hoping to capitalise on fatigue, if not disaffection, with Bihar’s presiding duopoly: Nitish Kumar and the Yadav family. The issues Kishor raised were genuine: joblessness, lack of industry and out-migration struck a chord with those who have long lamented Bihar’s steady decline, in particular the increasingly marginalised urban middle class. Not surprisingly, a number of Jan Suraj candidates were middle class professionals, from doctors to retired bureaucrats and police officers.
As a political narrative, Kishor’s targeted attack on the old order was the right note to strike. As a vote-garnering machine it had more limited appeal: the two main alliances in Bihar have a combined vote share of roughly 80%, largely built around solid caste allegiances. For a new player to break into this charmed circle, the caste and community equations have to be disrupted which can’t be achieved by a catch-all ‘Bihar First’ slogan.
Caste identities continue to trump Bihari sub-nationalism when it comes to voting preferences as Kishor has probably realised. He was hoping, mistakenly as it turns out, that perhaps the ‘Yuva’ vote would be a game-changer. After all, as high as 22% of Bihar’s voting population is in the 18-29 age group, a potential large voter cohort. But an even larger grouping is the ‘Mahila’, the women who have become the real X factor in Indian elections. While the Yuva are splintered along income levels, the Mahila voter is more of a monolith around which the Nitish Kumar model of basic welfarism and cash hand-outs has been built.
When Kishor promised to lift Bihar’s liquor ban, he sparked off a heated debate amongst the state’s chattering classes. Lifting prohibition might make economic sense but in rural Bihar, the liquor ban is widely endorsed by women groups. On the ground, the public health and law and order gains are seen to vastly outweigh any economic benefits.
So is this the end of the road for Kishor? Yes and no. Yes, the limitations of his brand of media-driven political marketing have been shown up. But in the next decade, Bihar will firmly enter the post-Nitish-Lalu age, desperately looking for options. If Kishor can stay the course and re-invent himself as less of a one-man show but someone willing to work steadfastly with a wider cross-caste combine, he might still have a story to tell. Could he, for example, be a resourceful, fire-in-the-belly Bihari face that a greatly diminished party like the Congress urgently needs?
(Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior
journalist and author.)
