Prashant Kishor not a maverick, he’s his leader's voice

Is Kishor’s work as a political consultant with parties ranging from YSR Congress to TMC to AAP in preparation for his mentor Nitish Kumar’s rise as the PM face of a non-Congress third front?

More than a year after joining the Janata Dal (United), Prashant Kishor has of late been playing the part of an active politician. A hyper-active one, in fact. While the seniors in his party watch on with apprehension, the JD (U) vice president has gradually emerged as the second-in-command to Nitish Kumar. And he has asserted his importance in a curious way – by raking up one controversy after another.

Some still believe that Prashant Kishor is acting like a loose cannon. But it is becoming increasingly clear that Kishor is no maverick. Rather, there is a method behind his moves that are slowly beginning to resemble a long-term game played on behalf of his political mentor, Nitish. The Bihar CM and JD (U) chief’s prime ministerial ambition are, of course, legendary.

In other words, the celebrated election strategist, who shot to fame for being the brain behind Narendra Modi’s historic 2014 campaign, is now working on another strategy. A reading of the tea leaves shows that his calibrated acts could well be in preparation for Nitish Kumar’s eventual rise as an acceptable prime ministerial face for non-Congress Opposition parties. Effectively, a challenger to the might of the BJP power machine that the JD (U) now backs.

Let’s look at the chain of events in the last fourteen months to see what they reveal. Prashant Kishor was allowed to join the JD(U) without giving up I-PAC, the election consultancy firm that he runs as a professional service. Then, over the last one year, he went to work for parties that are non-aligned (neither in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), nor in the United Progressive Alliance). The list includes Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, and Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP. Now, he is set to be associated with M K Stalin’s DMK. All these parties are anti-BJP by nature, and all of them have distanced themselves from Congress in recent times. None of these parties, for example, were at the recent Opposition meeting convened by Congress’ Sonia Gandhi.

Are these not signs of the forging an alternative opposition front – a third front that would compel the Congress to support it not only in the states (as it has done in Karnataka and Maharashtra), but also at the Centre?

Apart from what he can do through I-PAC, Prashant Kishor has also started asserting himself as an ideologue of the party. Nitish Kumar was under heavy pressure from the BJP to support the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAA) in parliament, mainly to enhance the government’s strength in the Rajya Sabha. He yielded. Then Prashant Kishor spoke. He questioned his leader on the party's move to support to such a controversial Bill. And then, as though yielding to Kishor’s pressure, the Bihar CM announced there would be no need for any National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Bihar. And now, on the floor of the Assembly, he has proposed that the Bihar Assembly may have a discussion on the CAA if the members so want.

Meanwhile, Kishor recently congratulated Congress for deciding to launch a movement against CAA-NRC. This is inappropriate for a top leader of a party in alliance with the rival of the Congress. But this has emerged as the new style in Indian politics, and the credit for its invention goes to Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray. The Sena, under his command, regularly criticised Narendra Modi and praised Rahul Gandhi while his party was part of the NDA government both in the state and at the Centre. Interestingly, Prashant Kishor is also known to have good ties with Uddhav, who has become the CM of a three-party front in Maharashtra that includes the Congress after his acrimonious fall-out with long-time ally BJP.

With the Bihar Assembly polls due in October 2020, Kishor has raised – although prematurely – the demand for allotting more seats to his party in the assembly elections than its alliance partner, BJP. It appears to be a pressure tactic to ensure that the JD(U) gets a few more seats than the BJP during the distribution of seats. In that case (or even in the case of a 100 seats for BJP and JD(U) each and 43 for the Ram Vilas Paswan’s party and smaller groups), Nitish Kumar is likely to win enough seats as to enable him to play the Uddhav Thackeray of Bihar. Nothing would prevent him from crossing over to the Opposition camp.

But just to set the record straight, it is Uddhav who has followed Nitish’s example when he dumped the BJP. Nitish has done it twice earlier. After winning the 2010 polls in alliance with the BJP, he dumped them in 2013. That time his minority government (a few seats short of majority) stayed in power with the tacit support of Lalu Prasad’s RJD. Again, after allying with RJD-Congress in 2015, he walked over to the BJP camp in 2017.

Nitish will not be shy of doing it again if he is projected as the prime ministerial candidate by all non-Congress opposition parties. This explains why he is allowing Prashant Kishor a long rope.

But will this strategy work? Tejashwi Yadav, the Opposition leader of Bihar who has named Nitish “Deceit Lord”, is bored with the senior leader’s regular flips. Recently, on the floor of the Assembly he told the CM: “What is your fear? Now your stint is ending. You have seen everything. You should take decisions to benefit future generations.” It was an exhortation to Kumar that if he has plans to change sides, he should do it now.

But other anti-BJP parties may be compelled to accept Nitish even if he changes sides a year before the 2024 general elections. Whether the people themselves will endorse such a deceitful but brilliant strategy is quite another matter though.

(Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a Kolkata-based journalist and author of books including, A Naxal Story. He is a deputy editor at the Bengali daily, Aajkal)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.