Jan Suraaj earned a lot of limelight, not enough votes

None of the 238 candidates fielded by Prashant Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party won a seat in the assembly polls.

- HT Correspondent

The Jan Suraaj contested 238 of the 243 seats in Bihar. It won none. And it polled just 3.3% of the popular vote, according to election commission data. Effectively, it wasn't a winner, loser, even spoiler (as some optimistic analysts expected it to be) -- but a literal non-player. It did do better than None of The Above (NOTA), though, which polled 1.8% of the votes.

Bihar state JSP president Manoj Bharti admitted that the results were shocking not as much in terms of seats as in terms of the vote percentage.

“We came to usher in change in Bihar, but we could not convince them the way it was required. The ruling dispensation also gave so many sops and used Jeevika Didis as poll agents to convince women that our efforts failed to achieve the desired impact,” he added.

The nonperformance of a party that perhaps got more attention from the mainstream media than it ought to have may well mark the end of the PK-myth.

In 2013, Prashant Kishor emerged from nowhere to play a big role in Narendra Modi’s successful campaign. Since then, he and his firm have worked with parties around the country, with the Congress reportedly trying to woo him by offering him a senior organisational post.