'Chanakya' Wins Patliputra: 4 Ways Prashant Kishor's Bankipur Win is a Big Deal
Prashant Kishor winning Bankipur is a massive development in Bihar politics, perhaps even national politics.
Why? Four reasons.
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It is the Assembly constituency of BJP’s national president Nitin Nabin, who has won this seat four times until he vacated it earlier this year to enter the Rajya Sabha. He had first won from the area in 2006, when it was Patna West before delimitation. The seat was represented by his father four times before.
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Bankipur has been one of the BJP’s strongest seats in Bihar. With the seat’s present boundaries, BJP’s lowest vote share in the constituency has been 59 percent in 2020. It has consistently won the seat with massive margins, its lowest being as high as 29 percentage points. Hugely dominated by ‘upper castes’, for the BJP, this seat is considered as safe as some seats in urban Gujarat. Its vote share has reduced by over 25 percentage points.
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This was the BJP’s first electoral battle after it installed its first chief minister in the state – Samrat Chaudhary – after sidelining ally Nitish Kumar.
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This is Prashant Kishor’s first win as a politician. He will now be in the Bihar Assembly as a prominent Opposition voice.
How did this win happen?
Kishor ran a strong issue-based campaign, targeting the state government on a number of issues, such as law and order, corruption, jobs and education.
He got support from across caste and community lines. The seat is dominated by the Kayastha community. The BJP candidate Neeraj Kumar Sinha is a Kayasth as is former MLA and BJP national president Nitin Nabin. Kishor is Brahmin. The RJD candidate Rekha Gupta is from the Vaishya community. All three major candidates were Upper Castes, who tend to vote heavily for the BJP in Bihar and much of the Hindi heartland.
According to inputs from the ground, while BJP seemed to have retained Kayastha votes, it lost ground among other Upper Castes. Then a sizable chunk of the RJD’s Yadav and Muslim voters are also said to have consolidated behind Kishor tactically. He also got sizable support from Dalits, MBC and EBC voters.
He is also said to have performed well among government employees and younger voters.
What does this mean going forward?
This is a warning sign for the BJP from Upper Caste voters. It is their way of saying that their vote cannot be taken for granted. Even a seat as strong as Bankipur is not safe if Upper Castes decide to shift.
Kishor’s win also means his emergence as a serious player in Bihar politics. In the 2025 Assembly elections, his Jan Suraaj Party failed to win a single seat and secured a vote share of 3.4 percent votes. Though disappointing for the party, it wasn’t an insignificant performance for a first-time contestant with no caste or community base.
It did well in postal votes, indicating some traction among government employees and armed forces personnel. A glimpse of this was also seen in 2023 when Jan Suraaj candidate Afaque Ahmad won the MLC election from the Saran teachers’ constituency.
Losing Bankipur despite having its own CM and it being the BJP president’s seat, is an embarrassment for the BJP. The space to watch out for in Bihar is now whether Kishor’s emergence triggers a realignment in state politics, in both the NDA and the Opposition. For the past three decades, Bihar politics had been dominated by the BJP, RJD and JD-U. Since 2015, the JD-U’s switches in allegiance had been tipping the scales one way or the other.
Now with Nitish Kumar sidelined by the BJP and BJP playing the OBC card with Samrat Chaudhary, there is a churn in state politics. Can he make further gains among Upper Castes as well as Nitish’s erstwhile base of Kurmis, Mahadalits and EBCs? And if he does, can the Congresss switch to Kishor the way it shifted allegiances from Stalin to Vijay in Tamil Nadu?
This result also comes on the heels of the students’ protest that prompted the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and caused embarrassment to the BJP.
