Trojan Horse

BY-ELECTIONS IN INDIA rarely make headlines. Yet, on the evening of 3 August, all news channels were tuned into the returns from the Bankipur by-election in Bihar, where Prashant Kishor, India’s best known political consultant, had been announced as the newly elected state legislator. Speaking to the press shortly after his victory, he sounded vindicated. “We have been saying this from day one: that the Bankipur election was not an election to elect an MLA. This was a verdict on BJP NDA government’s leadership in Bihar,” he said, referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Development Alliance government in Bihar, with the Janata Dal (United). Just months ago, the BJP had ousted the JD(U) supremo, Nitish Kumar—Bihar’s longest-serving chief minister and Kishor’s former client—and taken the chief ministership for itself. “The people of Bankipur, who have been Modi’s and BJP’s voters thus far, through this mandate they have sent a message to Modiji, that ‘We too have supported you,’” Kishor continued. “If you care so much for Gujarat, time has come that you also worry about the people of Bihar. You shouldn’t ask for votes in exchange for four kilos of grain or in the name of caste. Let’s talk about education and employment for Bihar. Let’s talk about how to stop the exodus of Bihar’s children.”

Seeing Kishor position himself against Narendra Modi’s leadership in this way and excoriate the NDA’s track record in Bihar, a lay observer could be forgiven for thinking that he had hitherto had no personal involvement with either. Yet, Kishor’s entry into public life had not only run parallel to but has been intimately tied up with Modi’s rise in national politics and the growing footprint of the BJP and its allies throughout the country. Bankipur is just over a hundred kilometres from Konar, a village in the Rohtas district where Kishor was born. Kishor’s journey back to his home state was long and meandering, taking many diversions and requiring him to wear different hats: public-health professional, high-level advisor in the Gujarat chief minister’s office, political consultant-at-large, JD(U) vice-president, the founder of a new political party and, now, a first-time state legislator.

I had been tracking Kishor and the political-consulting firm he founded, the Indian Political Action Committee, since 2015, when I was a doctoral student researching the professionalisation of Indian elections, focussing on the rising dominance of firms such as I-PAC. Even though he was by no means India’s first political consultant, by that point, Kishor’s name and organisation was virtually synonymous with the industry as a whole. He first caught public attention as the man behind the high-tech innovations of Modi’s 2014 prime-ministerial campaign. After Modi, Kishor worked for other big-time leaders, such as Nitish in Bihar, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, Amarinder Singh in Punjab and Jagan Mohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh. 

“As someone who does not have a surname, it is very difficult to enter politics. No matter what the leaders say on the stage. You can enter as a karyakarta, but, to gain a foothold, to do something meaningful, there is very little option,” Kishor had observed, in 2019. “From Tamil Nadu to Kashmir, barring one or two exceptions, it is all closed at the top. It’s all meant for the families.” For a while, it seemed as though he was content with political-consulting firms. I-PAC was the vehicle through which he, and a new generation of young Indians, could enter the political arena without formally joining political parties or their frontal organisations. But after nearly a decade of working behind the scenes with politicians, in 2024, Kishor decided to throw his hat in the ring by launching the Jan Suraaj Party, one of India’s newest political outfits.