On 3rd August, Monday, the Election Commission announced that Prashant Kishor, the election strategist who built his own party, had won the Bankipur assembly seat in Patna by around 19,000 votes.
Bankipur sits in the state capital and had gone to the BJP for three decades. It is reported to be a constituency dominated by the ‘General Caste’ voters. The man who vacated it, Nitin Nabin, is now the party’s national president; he held the seat in 2010, 2015, 2020 and again last November, when he won it by more than 50,000 votes.
Within hours, many reasons were in circulation. The prime among them were:
1) That the bypoll took place when sentiments in favour of the ‘Gen-Z’ protest over leak of the NEET 2026 paper were still strong and those sentiments were against the BJP. In short, young voters angry with the party.
2) There is still fury over the death of Bharat Bhushan Tiwari, the 28-year-old shot dead by police in Bhojpur on 17 June.
3) There is discontent over UGC guidelines notified by the Centre in January this year (since stayed by the Supreme Court)
4) The narrative that BJP’s machinery for carrying genuine ground-level feedback to the top has broken.
But did Bankipur really have to be won by Prashant Kishor for these insights to become apparent?
The CJP protest ended on 25 July. The Bharat Tiwari encounter was on 17 June. The anti-UGC sentiment is apparent since the beginning of the year. The grumbling about BJP feedback loop being broken has been going on since at least June 2024.
None of these were contingent on how Bankipur voted, and even if the BJP had held the seat by 5,000 votes, all would still continue to be relevant talking points. At the most, they would be presented as challenges weathered by an embattled party and its voter base.
Bankipur is a single seat out of 243. Turnout was 34.24 per cent, more than seven points below the 41.45 per cent this same seat recorded in November, so two voters in three stayed home. Mid-term bypolls also draw the kind of voter who wants to register a complaint rather than pick a government. Also, Kishor is also famous in a way his party isn’t. Voting for him to win a bypoll and voting for Jan Suraaj to form the government are not the same thing.
This doesn’t make the Bankipur bypoll result meaningless, it only underlines that the result gives us no new information which political observers and participants did not already have.
BJP President Nitin Nabin has promised a thorough introspection of the Datia (MP) and Bankipur losses. But there hardly seems to be anything new that an introspection exercise might reveal that was not already apparent by late July.
Absolutely right .
The termites have come out as if Diwali is round the corner.
When did a bypoll ever become a referendum in our country?
Loving the meltdown though..
(a)No.4 will be common to all the states in India, wherever whenever BJP puts candidates.
In West Bengal BJP won despite this. Reality is it's the Arrogance of central bjp that brushes aside loop from state party workers.
(b)No.5 not mentioned here above could have been this way- ' master stroke' by BJP by making PK relevant again.