Prashant Kishor attains unassailable lead of 15,864 votes in bypoll to BJP's Bankipur bastion

PATNA: Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor on Monday established an unassailable lead in Bihar's Bankipur assembly constituency, a BJP bastion where a bypoll was necessitated after its president Nitin Nabin vacated the seat.

Kishor, a celebrated poll strategist who made his electoral debut, had established a lead, from the very first round, over his BJP rival Neeraj Kumar Sinha. Kishor was ahead by 15,864 votes after 26 of 31 rounds of counting.

Jubilations erupted in the Jan Suraaj Party camp, replacing the dejection that had set in after the fledgling outfit drew a blank in Assembly elections held in November last year.

"This is the beginning of a golden age for our party," said bureaucrat-turned-politician Manoj Bharti, who is the state president of the Jan Suraaj Party.

"In a democracy, the will of the people is supreme. The verdict is a message to parties and leaders who arrogantly think of constituencies as fiefdoms," he said.

RJD's Rekha Gupta, whom Nabin had defeated by a margin of about 50,000 votes last year, only to give it up a few months later upon election to the Rajya Sabha, was finishing a distant third.

BJP workers were a picture in contrast, as the exuberance on display in the morning, when hundreds of them turned up at city-based sweets shop, to pick up 200 kg of 'laddoos' they had ordered expecting a certain victory, gave way to shock and despondency.

Kishor, who had shied away from contesting last year's Assembly polls, entered the fray in the by-election calling it a "referendum" on the BJP-led government in the state and claiming that his victory would cause Samrat Choudhary, the first saffron party chief minister of Bihar, to step down.

His impending victory was being hailed as "a lesson to the arrogant BJP" even by those outside his party, like Janshakti Janata Dal president Tej Pratap Yadav, the estranged elder son of RJD supremo Lalu Prasad, and CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, whose party is an INDIA bloc partner.

Polling, which was held on July 30, had followed days of intensive campaign by Kishor as well as the BJP, with both sides repeatedly accusing each other of electoral malpractices and approaching the Election Commission over the issue.

"The verdict in Bankipur must be viewed in the backdrop of the wider dissatisfaction with the BJP which recently got reflected in the students' protests. Of course, credit must also be given to Prashant Kishor, who displayed enormous energy and organisational skills," said veteran socialist leader Shivanand Tiwary, who had been one of the foremost participants in the 'JP movement' of 1970s, and in a political career spanning many decades, has been with parties like RJD and JD(U).