The Outsider’s Paradox of Prashant Kishor and the Curse of Power

By now, it's clear that Prashant Kishor doesn't do half-measures.

- Ravi Shankar

The man who once sold dreams to political parties has now decided to script his own. Having been shown the door from the BJP's back room powermasters, he went freelance, turning political consultancy into a billion-rupee cottage industry. He taught parties how to sell themselves to the public. Now, he's trying to sell himself. For months, Kishor has been trudging through Bihar, conducting his "padayatra" like a modern Chanakya on foot, pitching his walk through Bihar as not just a political campaign but as a pilgrimage of belief, an attempt to convert scepticism into structure. His men fan out like monks of modernity, measuring moods, mining data, and mapping discontent. But the soil of Bihar and of India blooms in myth, caste, and memory, not metrics. Kishor's pitch is of the honest outsider, the uncorrupted insider of the electoral machine. But we've seen this movie before.