Prashant Kishor's Long Walk

His Jan Suraaj Party has emerged from a grassroots movement. For the Bihar Assembly polls, Kishor has announced that the party will contest all 243 seats in the state. Md Kaifee Alam & Georgie Koithara report

- Md Kaifee Alam & Georgie Koithara report

Slogans such as "Hamara neta kaisa ho, Prashant Kishor jaisa ho" rent the air when Kishor—on October 2, 2022—started his padayatra across Bihar from Bhitiharwa Gandhi Ashram, in West Champaran.

Over the past almost 12 years, Kishor has helped shape electoral strategies for Narendra Modi, Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, and Arvind Kejriwal, but has turned away from being a backroom boy to launch an ambitious grassroots movement, Jan Suraaj.

It began as a mass-outreach programme to assess the situation in Bihar and reached one of its goals—to be launched as a political party—two years later. The Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) was formally floated last year, with Kishor choosing October 2 for this event too. Initially, he had claimed that the people of Bihar would decide whether the movement would shape into a party. However, it was evident right from the get-go that a political party would be launched since an application was filed for registering it with the same name to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on August 26, 2022, even before the yatra had started. The ECI documents list SK Mishra as president, Bijaya Sahoo as general secretary, and Ajit Singh as treasurer of the party.

With over 10 million members, or so it claimed, at the time of its launch, the JSP, even at such a nascent stage, boasts a strong organisational network built on the back of Kishor's yatra, which reached people at panchayat level to achieve the avowed objective of what he described as a "people-driven political platform".