PK launches yatra from JP's birthplace
1
2
Patna:
Jan Suraaj
founder
Prashant Kishor
on Tuesday launched the "
Bihar Badlao Yatra
" from Sitab Diara, the ancestral village of socialist icon
Jaiprakash Narayan
in Bihar's Saran district. The yatra is widely seen as a move to build public awareness about the need for systemic change and present an alternative in the next assembly elections.
Kishor began the yatra after paying floral tributes at JP's statue and visiting his ancestral home. He expressed dismay over its condition. "JP's followers are enjoying air conditioning in their homes while JP's house in Sitab Diara remains enveloped in pitch darkness," Kishor told reporters. He urged the govt to restore electricity to the house through public donations.
"I have not come to see JP's deteriorating house but to draw inspiration from the birthplace of Loknayak.
However, witnessing the condition here strengthens my resolve for change in Bihar," he said.
Criticising those claiming to be JP's ideological heirs, Kishor added, "JP gave a call for 'total revolution' aimed at 'Vyavastha Parivartan'. Sadly, neither has the system changed nor has there been any improvement. Those who claim to be his disciples have run governments riddled with corruption and nepotism."
Kishor announced that he would cover all 243 assembly constituencies over the next 120 days, without taking a break or returning home, and would address two rallies daily.
His yatra comes in the wake of a poor performance in the recent by-elections. Except for one seat, Jan Suraaj candidates lost their deposits in three out of four contests held in Nov. Kishor launched the party in Oct last year.
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The Hindu
20 hours ago
- The Hindu
Jan Suraaj Party pitches Prashant Kishor as Bihar's ‘most popular' CM pick - a look at its poll strategy
'Declare Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister candidate if he is the face of the NDA,' challenged Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor on May 30, as he toured the state in his 'Bihar Badlav Yatra'. Mr. Kishor, a political strategist, who was instrumental in strategising several political campaigns, including those of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, is setting himself up as a third alternative in Bihar beside the Mahagathbandhan (RJD-Congress-Left) and the National Democratic Alliance (BJP-JDU-LJP). Speaking to The Hindu, on Thursday (June 5, 2025), JSP working President Mr. Manoj Bharti pitched Mr. Kishor as a potential CM candidate. 'He is the most popular choice for CM in Bihar. The whole country and Bihar should forget about Nitish Kumar in the coming election. There is just no way that he can be in any position to drive anything in the next government. We are not going to form any coalition with anyone before or after polls. We will not join anyone just for the sake of forming a government,' says Mr. Bharti. Since October 2022, Mr. Kishor has been touring Bihar on foot, highlighting key issues like unemployment, migration, and inflation in the State, spanning 5000 kilometres across 17 districts. Two years later, he launched the 'Jan Suraaj Party' with a 'human first' approach, aiming to build a Bihar where 'people from Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab come in search of work.' Within days, his new party's popularity among the masses was tested. While JSP failed to open its accounts in the November 2024 by-polls held for four seats – Ramgarh, Belaganj, Imamganj and Tarari— Mr. Kishor expressed satisfaction with polling 10% of the total votes in these seats. Here's a look at Jan Suraaj's origins, journey, objectives and poll strategy. Prashant Kishor's Bihar journey Prashant Kishor has been active in strategising poll campaigns since 2012. After successfully aiding Mr. Modi in his re-election as Gujarat CM in 2012 and later in 2014 as Prime Minister, Mr. Kishor first forayed into Bihar in 2015. Bringing rivals Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar together as the 'Mahagathbandhan,' Mr. Kishor was instrumental in limiting BJP to a mere 58 seats in the 243-member Assembly. Despite Mr. Kumar's shifting loyalties, he retained Mr. Kishor as his political advisor, even appointing him JD(U)'s vice-president and his potential 'successor.' However, Mr. Kishor's stint with JDU came to an end in 2020 after he vociferously opposed the party's support for the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Expelled from JDU in January that year, Mr. Kishor launched 'Baat Bihar Ki' — a campaign to attract people to help him find Bihar its 'rightful place among top 10 States of India in next 10-15 years.' In the following two years, Mr. Kishor hit the ground with his 'Baat Bihar Ki' campaign, undertaking a padyatra across the State. Targetting Mr. Kumar for the poverty in Bihar, he claimed that the NDA's 15-year regime had brought no development to the state. As a caste survey was done across Bihar, Mr. Kishor questioned why Mr. Kumar had not increased the reservation limit, disbursed financial aid to poor and homeless families, or handed over land rights to Dalit farmers. JSP has promised to decide on the implementation of these promises once it forms government. In October 2024, Mr. Kishor announced the launch of JSP based on five principles, including a one-year tenure for its party president and two years for its council members, and selection of poll candidates in a process similar to the primaries held by parties in the United Statess. JSP has promised to announce initial nominees in March and the final candidate for every seat by November. The party has promised to advocate for the 'Right to Recall' system for public representatives and to display both Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar on their official flag. JSP's entry was opposed by RJD, which accused Mr. Kishor of acting as a 'B-Team of BJP.' Seeking to frame Mr. Kishor's entry as a ploy to pit the OBCs and the upper castes against each other, RJD MP Misa Bharti said, 'Who is Prashant Kishor Pandey? Pandeys have this business of abusing Yadavs.' In response, Mr. Kishor chose Madhubani-born Manoj Bharti, a former diplomat and a Dalit, as the party's first working president, promising to build a developed Bihar. JSP's electoral performance In November 2024, JSP faced its first electoral test as it fielded candidates for the by-elections in Tarari, Ramgarh, Belaganj and Imamganj, as their MLAs were recently elected to Lok Sabha. In Tarari, JSP fielded Kiran Singh against BJP's Vishal Prashant — son of baahubali (strongman) Narendra Kumar Pandey — and CPI-ML's Raju Yadav. BJP managed to wrest the seat from CPI-ML, while JSP finished a distant third with 5622 votes. In Ramgarh, JSP fielded Sushil Singh Kushwaha against BJP's Ashok Kumar Singh and RJD's Ajit Kumar Singh in a bid to woo the Kushwaha community and capitalise on the division of votes. However, BJP managed to wrest this seat too from RJD as JSP finished fourth with 6513 votes. In Belaganj, which has a sizable Muslim and Extremely Backward Classes (EBC) population, JSP fielded Mohd. Amjad against two heavyweights — Vishwanath Kumar Singh of RJD and Manorama Devi of JDU. Mr. Kishor's gamble failed as JDU's Manorama Devi, wife of baahubali Bindi Yadav, trumped Mr. Amjad by a margin of 56,049 votes. In Imamganj, JSP fielded Jitendra Paswan, a well-known pediatrician from the area, against Deepa Santhosh Manhi of NDA ally Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular), who is the daughter-in-law of party chief Jitan Ram Manjhi. Mr. Paswan failed to dent Ms. Manjhi's vote share as he polled 37,103 votes. In the wake of the poll drubbing, former MPs Devendra Prasad Yadav and Monazir Hassan quit the party. However, Mr. Kishor remained undeterred, making a slew of promises to be fulfilled if voted to power – lifting prohibition and spending the liquor tax revenue on education, offering low-interest loans to working class with better disbursal, and providing a monthly pension of ₹2000 for senior citizens. JSP has also promised land reforms and easy loans to women with the State government providing the required guarantee. JSP also received a boost after Nitish Kumar's estranged aide R.C.P Singh merged his outfit Aap Sabki Awaz party with it on May 18, 2025. Mr. Singh, a former IAS officer known for his booth-level organisational skills in the JDU, fell out with Mr. Kumar and was removed from the Union Cabinet in October 2024. He has since then been a harsh critic of Mr. Kumar, calling Bihar's bifurcation and the prohibition a mistake. 'According to some estimates, almost ₹20,000 crore of tax revenue from liquor is not being utilized. Prohibition is only on paper. Liquor is not available in shops but is available for home delivery. Anyone who wants to consume it can get it at a premium price. A huge section of officers are earning ill-gotten money through corruption and in the name of stopping liquor sale, half of the police force is trying to control it and trying to have a piece of the cake,' explains Mr. Bharti. Factors affecting JSP's strategy and its prospects The passage of the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, during this year's Parliamentary Budget Session gave rise to questions about the potential impact on the polls in Bihar, where Muslims make up around 18% of the population. According to a Lokniti-CSDS survey, the Mahagathbandhan has cornered the Muslim votes in the past three decades. In 2005, the Mahagathbandhan cornered 40% of the Muslim vote, while NDA polled only 4% of the community's votes. In subsequent elections (2010, 2015 and 2020), Nitish Kumar's shifting loyalties have swayed the Muslim vote towards either coalition. With the NDA, JDU helped the coalition by polling 21% support from Muslims, while RJD polled 32% of the Muslim votes, and Congress, which did not ally with the RJD, got 22% votes. In 2015, JDU allied with RJD and cornered the support of 69% of Muslims, while NDA got only 6% of the community's vote share. Five years later, 76% of Muslims voted for the RJD-Congress combine while only 5% of Muslims supported the NDA. The Lokniti-CSDS survey concluded that the JD(U)-BJP alliance has never been a primary choice for Muslim voters, making a significant electoral shift unlikely in 2025. 'There is little reason for the NDA to worry in Bihar,' mused Lokniti-CSDS analysts in a column in The Hindu, dismissing JSP's impact in these polls. However, Mr. Bharti disagrees. 'We have a selection process which entails feedback from the ground from the village level, from the block level, from the division level before evaluating candidates. Per seat, atleast 5-10 potential candidates have been nominated of which one will be chosen,' he says. The party is following the same pattern to identify candidates as that used by political consultancy firm Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) —an organisation founded by Mr. Kishor. Instead of castes, JSP has divided Bihari society into five broad classes – forward, backward, extremely poor, Muslims and Dalits. 'Based on their percentage in the population, as per the caste census that was done in Bihar, we will distribute tickets for all 243 seats. For example, Muslims constitute 18-19%, so they will be given 40 seats,' says Mr. Bharti. When asked if a Muslim candidate will be chosen in a Muslim-majority constituency, he says, 'Yes, that will be the main criteria.' Mr. Kishor has hinted at his own poll debut from Raghopur. The seat has been held by Lalu Yadav's chosen heir, Tejashwi Yadav, since 2015. Not ruling out a potential clash between Mr. Kishor and the RJD scion, Mr. Bharti says, 'Mr. Kishor has said that he has no problem fighting from any seat the party decides, including Raghopur. He is not afraid of fighting anyone from anywhere.' Raghopur, which falls under the district of Vaishali, has a sizable population of Rajputs in the Yadav-dominated region, opening avenues for the JSP to split the upper caste vote in the seat.
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Hindustan Times
Terms of Trade: Are universities as radical as they were 50 years ago?
This column was written on a day which marks 50 years of Jaiprakash Narayan's call for Sampoorn Kranti (total revolution) in Patna (June 5). While JP's clarion call in 1975 was targeted at politics at large, students played a big role in the agitation which would eventually force Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency. The JP movement prepared ground for the Congress losing power in India two years later and changed Indian politics forever. The student leaders who led the agitation in Bihar, and in many other parts of the country, went on to become successful and important politicians in India. 2025 marks 50 years of the Emergency and there is bound to be a lot of writing on the event and its implications for India. Among the best things to read is Srinath's Raghavan's latest book, Indira Gandhi and Years that Transformed India, which this columnist hopes to write about in detail very soon. This week's edition of the column is not about the Emergency. But it is on a related subject in more contemporary times. Are universities as important centres of political rebellion as they were 50 years ago in India? To be sure, political activism and agitations in universities are not just an India specific phenomenon. Europe saw a wave of such agitations during the anti-fascist and pro-communist phase in the 1930-40s and both the US and Europe during the anti-war protests in the 1960s and 70s. A cursory look suggests universities continue to remain epicentres of agitations and are therefore also attracting the ire of the powers that be. In India, the arc of university-based agitations seems to have traversed from the left leaning protestor-par-excellence Jawaharlal Nehru University to the privately owned Ashoka University. The latter has been built by a joint corpus contributed by some of India's most successful post-reform capitalists. In the US, it is none other than Harvard, the crème de la crème of Ivy Leagues, which is fighting what can be described as an existential battle with the Trump administration. Trump's latest attack has been to suspend Harvard from the international student visa programme which, unless reversed, will deal a crippling blow to its finances as well as academic excellence. This is not just about a handful of institutions. There are students and faculty members across universities who are putting a lot of things, including their professional careers, at stake for defending the values they hold dear; be it the cause of Palestine in American campuses or secularism and nuanced debates around it in India. These stylised facts will tempt many to say that music in the cafes and revolution in the air prognosis still holds for educational campuses in the world. This column, in keeping with its circumspect tradition, would like to argue that there is merit in taking a more critical look at the unambiguous celebration of radicalism in university campuses. Such a view is required not because one has to necessarily agree or disagree with the causes being espoused by the agitating students and faculty. The bigger reason why this argument needs engagement is because the criticality emerging out of universities has suffered a rupture with larger political-economy outside these campuses, both in the advanced world as well as countries such as India. The reasons for this rupture is that universities and their protestors have failed to come to terms with the political implications of the economic developments in the last 50 years. The divergence is easier to explain in the US. One of the biggest differences between Trump's and his opponents' political bases in the last three presidential elections has been the gap between voters who went to college and who did not. An opinion page piece in the Wall Street Journal on June 3 says that 'the Republican Party had increased its vote share in three consecutive presidential elections in 1,433 counties, nearly half the national total' and 'in not a single county in which the Republican Party increased its share of the vote did a majority of adults hold a college degree.' This is in keeping with Trump's 'I love the poorly educated' retort to Hillary Clinton's suicidal jibe against him in the 2016 elections. Why the poorly educated loved Trump back should not be rocket science to anyone who has basic intelligence. As the world embraced globalization, more and more blue-collared jobs moved out of the US to countries such as Japan, South-East Asia and eventually China even as highly educated workers, American or foreign born, amassed large fortunes in the knowledge economy dominated by things such as finance and technology and the ecosystems they created or supported. The neoliberal order in America, which had bipartisan support until Trump arrived on the scene, consistently tilted the balance of power and prosperity in an unprecedented manner against the non-educated and in favour of those who went to elite universities. Most of the Ivy-Leaguers did nothing to protest against this growing divide. As Trump trains his guns on the elite universities, he does not have to worry about a political blowback from their stakeholders. They were never with him to begin with and Trump's actual voters see the highly educated as having been oblivious to their increasing predicament. That knowledge creation might become a collateral damage in this process is just an incidental outcome in Trump's scheme of things. In India the biggest intellectual political indictment of the student movement came at the turn of the 1990s when the Mandal-Kamandal binary erupted. India's upper-caste dominated higher education saw a large (even if reactionary) rebellion against the imposition of Mandal Commission recommendations which brought in reservations for the Other Backward Classes in education and government jobs for the first time. The political constituency for Mandal was much bigger than the opposition to it in the universities and it has never looked back in its struggle for expanding the realm of affirmative action since then. The announcement of a caste census and (the likely-to-follow) expansion of the OBC quota is yet another advance in this long march. Indian universities today are far more socially representative than they used to be in the 1990s. However, this progressive turn of events has been eclipsed by a right-wing tilt in Indian polity, namely, the rise of Hindutva which started from the Ram Temple movement in the late 1980s. While the high priests of Indian academia, especially its progressive spectrum, lost the chance to be vanguardist on the question of social justice to those outside their sanitised boundaries, they went horribly wrong in claiming vanguardism in the fight against communalism. This crisis and mistake were the most prominent in the initiative by historians of the Jawaharlal Nehru University who tried to counter the Ram Temple movement and the BJP by making it a debate on historiography, which is something this column has written about earlier as well. Despite the best efforts of many political commentators to portray the Mandal and Kamandal projects as fundamentally antithetical, there is clear evidence to argue that the two have been talking to each other in the last three and a half decades and been able to find common ground. It is this mismatch between theory and practice which has led to an absence of large student agitations – there have been flash points for sure – against the current regime. The entrenched organisations would like to marry caste and communalism but the former's larger constituency is more interested in advancing its own agenda and settling some intra-group scores than fighting a pitched battle against Hindutva. To be sure, the fall in militancy of the student movement in India is not just a result of a muddled discourse on caste versus communalism. It is as much a function of class. When students rebelled en masse during the Emergency, attending public universities in the hope of landing a plain vanilla government job was pretty much the only game in town for Indians in higher education. Economic reforms changed all this as millions of students started going to private vocational educational institutions. While the education or training was not necessarily great here, these places worked wonders for young graduates who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Challenges presented by a rise in economic inequality and a failure to achieve a larger economic transformation notwithstanding, India's higher education became extremely promising even if expensive for a vast majority of young students who did not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. Radicalism was the last thing on their minds when the world was awash with private sector jobs. This is also why India could never really develop an anti-neoliberal movement among its educated even though there has been a consistent pushback from the really poor in terms of demands to expand the welfare net. While it is early days, there are signs that the global economic turbulence, rising protectionism in the advanced world and rise of things such as AI will land a big blow to the buy-a-degree-and-get-employed model of education in India. What will perhaps make this crisis worse is the fact that today's youth have aspirations which go beyond the basic roti-kapda-makan for the youth of the 1970s. This mismatch between aspirations and reality likely transcends ideological boundaries on things such as religion and caste. While more and more politicians are pretending to cater to these growing anxieties by talking about things such as more government jobs and possibility of reservations (not necessarily caste based) in the private sector, young people know that they are hardly a call to change the system or overhaul it fundamentally. The periodic precipitations in universities, elite and non-elite, have so far failed to strike a chord with this latent anxiety which is building among India's youth. That universities are essential not just for making people employable but also the battleground of ideas is an argument one often hears while criticising regimes cracking down on academic institutions or protestors belonging to them. The moral imperative of such an argument must confront the reality that present day democracy works in the confines of capitalism which, if one were to paraphrase Marx's famous quote in The Communist Manifesto, is committed to making ideas of the ruling ideas of any age the ideas of the ruling class. Does this mean the idealism around student movements is misplaced? A lesser-known quote from Marx can answer this question. 'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter', he writes in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. 50 years after India's students led an agitation and braved far more severe repressions than what is happening today to overthrow the strongest party in the country from power, it is worth asking whether today's student movements, both in India and abroad, and their advocates, are being able to grasp the 'root of the matter' or falling victim to Marx famous warning against philosophers, who are always only interpreting the world rather than changing it. Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
New Indian Express
a day ago
- New Indian Express
Nitish Kumar: A CM full of surprises
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar always has a 'surprise' up his sleeve whenever he is in public. This time around, Nitish was participating at a public function in Darbhanga when, in the middle of his speech, he suddenly pointed at Deputy Chief Minister and BJP leader Samrat Choudhary, saying, 'Our party's deputy CM has also arrived, stand up.' After this, all the ministers, MPs and others sitting around him stood up while the audience clapped enthusiastically. Undoubtedly, the CM considers standing up as a sign of reverence. To that effect, he had appealed to people to stand up from their respective seats to welcome PM Modi during the Bikramganj rally, giving observers a reason to smile even as poll heat intensifies in Bihar. PK targets Lalu, Tejashwi over CM ambition Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor never misses a chance to take a dig at RJD chief and former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad. During his 'Bihar Badlao Yatra', he accused Lalu of aspiring to see his son, Tejashwi Yadav, as 'King of Bihar', even though he has not cleared class 9. Kishor clarified he is not criticising Lalu for his 'putra moh' (affection for son) but praising him because people must learn how to take care of their children from the former CM. Lalu has always been worried about his family and not the people of Bihar, Kishor jibed. 'He is so worried about his child that he wants him to become 'king of Bihar'. When I say this, people say I complain about him. No! We are praising Lalu Yadav.' BJP MLA draws flak from rape-murder victim's kin A piquant situation unfolded when BJP MLA Manoj Kumar Gupta asked family members of a rape-murder victim in Muzaffarpur to swear they were telling the truth about 'delay' in treatment of the victim at Patna Medical College and Hospital. The victim's family got agitated over the MLA's contention and alleged the latter didn't pay heed to their repeated calls for help when they visited the hospital for treatment of 9-year-old victim. As the situation heated up, deputy CM Vijay Sinha intervened and assured that justice would be done. Sinha said the government has taken a grave view of the incident and the offenders would not be spared. Ramashankar Our correspondent in Bihar ramashankar@
