Prashant Kishor's Bihar debacle: How the master strategist lost his own battle

Three years of hard work hasn't paid well for strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, whose Jan Suraaj Party failed to convert his passionate "warnings" and "convincing" arguments into votes. Kishor had urged Bihar to break free from age-old caste alliances, and emotionally rooted political loyalties and instead choose an intellectually driven people’s movement for development and change. But the electorate did not buy into his pitch. His poll plank centred on challenging the political image of BJP-JDU leaders, and disrupting both traditional caste loyalties and the opposition’s Muslim-Yadav vote bank, but this ultimately fell flat.

Because one thing that seemed to have quickly changed the direction of elections, claim Kishor loyalists, is cash doles plotted by the ruling NDA and an