How Prashant Kishor Took Center Stage In Bihar’s Student Protests

All the fervour around Prashant Kishor's participation in the students' protest rose to a crescendo with his arrest in the early hours of 6 January 2025.

The drama that unfolded over the next few hours was unlike anything native Biharis who saw their first sunlight after the 1980s had seen.

Kishor’s supporters grabbed on to him in an attempt to prevent the police from arresting him. They failed. He was then taken to the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS), Patna, where doctors, refusing to comply with the police’s request for a fake medical certificate, denied Kishor admission.

This happened at other health centres too, since most of these doctors and hospital staff were already members of the Jan Suraaj Party (JSP).

Kishor said so himself. His recounting of the episode brings to mind Rajinikant's character in the film Sivaji: The Boss. The character enjoyed similar goodwill from government officers. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that Kishor is well aware of the optics around his politics.

Meanwhile, the drama played out longer, as Patna police kept doing the rounds of the city for six to seven hours. Kishor’s JSP army and other supporters trailed the police, but the administration later shooed them away.

In the afternoon, Kishor was presented to the court. He was asked to surrender a bond promising not to restart the protest. Kishor denied the offer and was subsequently taken to Beur Central Jail.

Before that, Patna Police had asked Kishor to calm his supporters down. He obliged by denying mistreatment or physical torture by the police force. He even acknowledged that one police personnel had offered him a jacket.

While he was being taken to Beur Jail, Kishor’s lawyers gave the bail plea one more shot and were able to secure an unconditional bail. It helped that the police had taken Kishor to Beur Jail without any paperwork.

Then, the political leader did a half-hour press conference and vowed to continue his fast-unto-death protest in support of students.

Just one day of drama around him, along with the circulation of videos that showed anarchy involving the police in Patna, meant that the Kishor got what he was clamouring for — he became the face of the students’ agitation.

But Kishor was not supposed to be that. The stage was set for someone else, like Tejashwi Yadav, to grab the hot seat and reverse the bad momentum spurred by recent bypoll defeats.

One of Tejashwi's major critiques against the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is that it has failed the youth by not providing them with timely and adequate jobs.

Painting a contrasting picture of his own tenure as deputy chief minister (between August 2022 and January 2024), Tejashwi claims to have given 5 lakh jobs to Bihari youth.

This narrative has had some traction on the ground, with a section of the Bihari populace believing that Tejashwi is different from his father, Lalu Yadav.

What also goes in junior Yadav’s favour is his preference for industrialists to be in his close political circle rather than the old-school Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) cadres.

Tejashwi just needed to sit in protest or strike, and the media coverage would have done the rest for him. But his support for students proved to be tokenism, as he marched on with his yatra.

A similar thing happened with Pappu Yadav, whose presence at the protest site was bright but breezy.

Kishor says he was initially reluctant to join the protest but that he had to join in after he found students’ voices to be falling on deaf ears among the authorities. He even challenged opposition leaders (mainly Tejashwi) to join in and lead the protests while he takes the backseat.

In response, Tejashwi said this whole episode was staged by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Kishor. There was also a brief ugly spat between Pappu and Kishor, which also saw the use of unparliamentary language.

However, judging by social media buzz, Tejashwi and Pappu realise that they are missing an opportunity here.

While on the ground, it is mainly about students, Kishor, and the Bihar administration; in the cyber world, it is a contest between the supporters of Jan Suraaj supporters and of all opposition, though primarily of Pappu and Tejashwi.

Social media accounts supporting Kishor and JSP are putting out pixelated evidence of young students connected to the Yadavs trying to defame Kishor and derail the protest. On the other hand, Yadavs' supporters are busy digging up details about the probable funding sources of Kishor.

The hullabaloo about Kishor’s vanity van is also a consequence of the war among cyber supporters.

It is now beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kishor has got the traction he deliberately needed after the bypoll results.

Local political analysts are now talking up Kishor's involvement in the Bihar protests as being similar to Anna Hazare's agitation against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in the 2000s.

However, there are difference between the two agitations.

Anna’s agitation, for instance, was focused on a singular problem, corruption, and the solution given by Anna's team was more of a quick fix.

Kishor’s protest, on the other hand, is focused on the plight of a few lakh students, and demands do not put much emphasis on any long-term overhaul of the system.

Moreover, Anna’s agitation was described as anti-political in nature (though innocent participants felt cheated later), and it evolved as a top-down protest in which anti-incumbent elites added numbers en masse.

Kishor’s protest is bottom-up and draws its legitimacy and organised form from being a new political party. Also, the current mass protests in Bihar were searching for a leader, and there Kishor was.

For students, Kishor is mainly seeking reexamination and not long-term structural changes in the process. While his JSP is focused on long term institutional changes in Bihar.

Kishor’s Main Agenda

On 2 October 2022, Kishor began his 3,500-kilometre (km)-long Padyatra from West Champaran district. It was seen as an attempt to emulate Mahatma Gandhi’s way of politics. The place picked to kick off the journey from was perhaps also an attempt to showcase his commitment.

In interviews during the yatra, Kishor often said it was the Congress Party whose ideology was closest to his heart, even though he didn't like the way the party was operating.

Kishor has traversed 2,697 villages and 1,319 panchayats to date as part of the yatra, as stated on Jan Suraaj’s website. Protests and election campaigns aside, the yatra is an ongoing effort.

During his yatras, Kishor covers 12-15 km in a span of five to six hours and addresses the public at nearly half a dozen places en route. The speeches focus on migration, unemployment, women's plight, and poor political culture.

Kishor’s appeals speak to the frustration of ordinary youths and women. His campaign has some out-of-the-box ideas for industrialisation, urbanisation, and revenue generation, among others.

To execute these ideas, Kishor is ready to take the anti-populist route, such as lifting the liquor ban. However, there is an attempt to balance it with populist programmes, such as cheaper loans and other cash incentives.

He has brought together like-minded, educated individuals within his party, JSP, which was launched on 2 October 2024 with former diplomat Arun Bharti as its first president.

Kishor’s core team consists of eminent legal professional Y V Giri, former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Anand Mishra — hailed as a hero of anti-insurgency operations in Assam — and former Vice Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen Krishna Singh, among others.

Despite limited exposure, JSP entered the Bihar bypoll ring in 2024. In the Imamganj Assembly constituency, JSP candidate Jitendra Paswan came in third, while in Belaganj, Surendra Yadav blamed JSP for his son’s loss. Overall, the party performed well, with a 9.5 per cent share of the total vote.

However, the results also raised questions. For instance, what is going to be JSP's core demographic in the traditional voting landscape? A safe bet would be forward castes, which have been on board with BJP and Nitish Kumar (not necessarily Kumar's party) for their pro-development record.

However, there has been growing disenchantment among forward castes with BJP and Kumar. While frustrations with the BJP are because the voters feel sidelined, Kumar's paving the way for the return of RJD in 2015 has impacted his long-term standing among the average forward voter.

The same can be said of RJD's Muslim-Yadav vote bank. Muslims are dissatisfied because they feel like a second-string community when it comes to leadership positions, while a section of the Yadav community has developed antipathy to the Lalu Yadav family, after Tejashwi began ignoring them in a probable attempt to make his party more inclusive.

Additionally, JSP receiving the indirect support of Chirag Paswan is hailed by many as a quid pro quo understanding. After Maharashtra, the BJP is uncertain about contesting the Bihar polls with Kumar as the chief minister candidate.

Paswan senses an opportunity to increase his stake in state politics. Kishor and his JSP could make Paswan's job easier by emerging as a strong contender in Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)) seats.

The downside of having these options is that none of them is currently a secure vote bank for JSP. Even at the time of writing this report, these are largely mathematical possibilities, as the bypolls revealed.

JSP lacked serious cadre presence in assembly constituencies. One reason could be that Kishor had not conducted his yatra in these places, which is why the organisational base was weak there.

This problem will persist in 2025 too. As we move forward, Kishor will find less and less time for his yatras, and his schedules are likely to be tinkered with due to developments, like the current protests.

Student Protests as a Stepping Stone

At the same time, aligning with these protests is essential for Kishor to gain traction for the core solutions he claims to provide for the state.

Pragmatically, before the 2025 assembly election, the best position Kishor can get himself and his party into is him replacing Tejashwi as the main opposition leader — not inside the assembly but within the public discourse unfolding in the nooks and corners of the state. The yatra has been able to achieve this but only in places where it has traversed so far.

Even in places where Kishor has left a mark, sustaining momentum is difficult. Bihar is a politically charged space where an opportunity missed by one party is quickly picked up by another.

JSP themselves capitalised in this way by organising their campaigns at a time when other parties' cadre bases were not quite politically active.

The alternative way is to take centre stage on issues that have a pan-state appeal. Kishor has been trying to capture the state’s attention by appearing on various national and local media platforms.

In the last few months, other party leaders, like Anand Mishra and Manoj Bharti, have also been doing that, alongside their party’s activities.

The Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) protests provided Kishor with just such an opportunity.

Now Kishor is ticking every box in this protest. He is talking to the editors of major media channels, criticising opposition leaders, answering reporters' questions with a mix of logical and rhetorical statements, and speaking fiercely in alignment with the public sentiment around the bureaucracy in Bihar.

Even before his arrest, Kishor termed Kumar-ruled Bihar a "jungle raj of bureaucrats." In his speeches during the protest, Kumar zeroed in on a few senior bureaucrats handling state affairs, as Kumar has been down with poor health.

Kishor's punchlines, such as “You are trying to scare me with SP?” and “No matter which officer it is, I do not fear, whether it is the District Magistrate of Patna or anyone else,” have gone viral in WhatsApp groups in the state.

Such a rebellious tone against officers is what people desperately want to hear in Bihar — a state where the craze for government jobs is still the highest in the country.

Instances abound of police personnel and district administrations deliberately harassing the public. Even a decent conversation between a Bihar police constable and the average fruit or vegetable vendor is a rarity.

Instead of serving people, rules and bye-laws have turned into a source of authoritarian response, which can be tweaked at the whims and fancies of the government employee applying them.

Kishor understands this deep-seated frustration, which is why during his press conference, he emphasised that corrupt officers would be punished after the upcoming election.

He would want his leadership of the students’ protest and the anti-bureaucracy sentiment to become a vehicle for JSP’s vision to reach places he won’t visit in the coming months.

Apart from him replacing Tejashwi as the face of the opposition, Kishor's schemes will also need to outperform Tejashwi’s in advertising and narrative.

While Tejashwi’s "five lakh jobs" narrative is on posters, real discussions around Kishor’s impact try to find a parallel in similar protests of the past. The "JP Movement," named after and led by Jayaprakash Narayan, amid the anti-Emergency wave was one such major protest in Bihar's not-so-distant past.

People have a bittersweet memory of the JP Movement. One section remembers it for ending the Emergency, while another blames it for destroying a generation of people and producing substandard versions of socialist politicians.

A 1955 protest, which began for starting a bus service, is also making a comeback in conversations. It had turned so ugly that Jawaharlal Nehru had to arrive in Patna only to be welcomed by a protest march — a rare sight in those days.

The Congress was able to save itself in the eventual election, but Mahesh Prasad Sinha — the minister responsible for it all — lost. Students from Patna had crossed over the Ganga river to ensure his defeat in Muzaffarpur.

Kishor’s protest is currently less intense than these two precedents. Except for his own party, JSP, he does not have organisational backing. But there are reports of various employee unions wanting to join hands with him.

However, Kishor's first aim would be to get BPSC to reconduct the examination. His persistence has made it a reputation issue for JSP.

With his fast unto death, Kishor has put himself further into the spotlight. Whether the immediate goal is achieved or not, Kishor can take solace in the fact that JSP's cadre base can be strengthened with the new round of publicity.