PK WALKS THE BIG POLL TALK

Prashant Kishor, the ace of the backroom, joins the battle for Bihar with lofty ambitions. Can his armoury of new ideas upset the old equations?

- AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

IT'S 11:15 pm on a Sunday. But the guard at the grand bungalow in Sheikhpura, Patna, has his hands full. Late-night visitors throng the gate. The driveway is packed with over two dozen vehicles, some sporting the flags of Bihar's big local parties. The sprawling lawn is agog with the chatter of a motley jumble. Aspiring politicians, academics, businessmen, rural folk whose next train is in the morning, youth with no job but with big ideas, males, females, about 100 faces, all lit up by their mobile phone screens and by the glint of hope.

Finally, there emerges the man they are waiting to meet, smiling, clad in a simple white kurta-pajama, dispensing handshakes and pats on the shoulder, wearing the ease of a well-rehearsed neta but with the brightness of a new act. Prashant Kishor, the ace political strategist, is poised on the cusp of dropping that third word from his description. His strategic trajectory, evolving over a decade, has led him to attempt a daring forward integration, directly entering the whirling waters of Bihar politics with a mint-new ship, the Jan Suraaj. October 2 is the party's launch-enough time to try set off a few cross-currents and waves ahead of the next assembly election, due latest by November 2025.

In a state whose politics treads well-known paths, Prashant Kishor arrives like an X-factor. With a resume that boasts of having crafted the backroom analytics as well as public outreach of electoral victors as diverse as Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, M.K Stalin and Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, he has got his political math and chemistry formulas down pat. Of all those leaders, the one he resembles most is Kejriwal an 'apolitical' outsider come to break the system. Bihar's netas are usually kneaded right out of its humid alluvial earth.