Will Prashant Kishor Succeed This Time?

The by-election for Bihar’s Bankipur Assembly seat is scheduled for July 30. The seat fell vacant after Nitin Nabin resigned as MLA following, first, his elevation as the BJP National President, and then his subsequent election to the Rajya Sabha. Ordinarily, this may have been treated as a routine vacancy in a safe seat. Jan Suraaj’s Prashant Kishor has announced that he will contest from here, marking his first entry into the electoral contests. The BJP has named Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) state vice-president Abhishek Kumar as its candidate thereby setting up a triangular contest against the RJD’s Rekha Gupta and Prashant Kishor. RJD’s Gupta had secured second position with 46,363 votes in the 2025 Assembly election. During the 2025 assembly elections in Bihar Kishore stayed out of the contest. His party contested many seats but failed to win a seat. His decision not to contest was seen as one of the main reasons for his new party’s poor performance and credibility. Bankipur is one of Patna’s most talked-about and VIP urban areas. It is part of the Patna Sahib Lok Sabha constituency, represented by BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad.  It is a seat dominated by the influential Kayastha electorate. Both the BJP and the RJD hope to consolidate their traditional social base due to this factor. With his entry, Kishor is seeking to make the bypoll a referendum on the NDA government in Bihar. A non-Kayastha, Kishor has opted for an intensive door-to-door campaign and neighbourhood meetings instead of large public rallies. He belongs to the Bhumihar community. BJP’s Abhishek Kumar comes from the Kayastha community, which has a sizeable population in Bankipur. In fact, the BJP has always fielded a Kayastha candidate here, from Thakur Prasad to Naveen Kishore Sinha to his son Nitin Nabin. Second, Abhishek Kumar has been a close aide of Nitin Nabin and also enjoys the confidence of Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary.