Bihar Election Results: Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj draws a blank; analysts say JSP’s dismal performance was due to…
As per Election Commission data, most of the candidates from Prashan Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party failed to secure even 10 percent of total votes polled in their respective constituencies, and will lose their security deposit.
Bihar Assembly Election Result 2025: The newly-floated Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) of celebrated former poll-strategist Prashant Kishor, failed to win any seats in the 243-member Bihar assembly, and its candidates are set to forfeit their security deposit in majority of the 238 seats the party had contested, as they failed to secure the minimum percentage of votes to be eligible for retrieving their deposit.
How much votes did Jan Suraaj candidates get?
As per Election Commission data, most of the candidates from Prashan Kishor-led Jan Suraaj Party failed to secure even 10 percent of total votes polled in their respective constituencies, and will lose their security deposit. Election rules mandate that candidates must secure at least one-sixth of the total votes polled to retrieve their security deposit of Rs 10,000 for general candidates and Rs 5,000 for SC and ST nominees.
The best performance from a JSP candidate came from Naveen Kumar Singh alias Abhay Singh, who secured the second spot from the Marhaura constituency. Singh received 58,190 votes, losing to RJD’s Jitendra Kumar Rai, who secured 86,118 votes, by a margin of 27928 votes.
In many seats, the vote count of JSP candidates is less than the NOTA (None of the Above) category, with Mohammad Ekramul Haque, who contested from the Forbesganj assembly seat, managing just 977 votes, while NOTA received 3,114 votes.
A minute portion of JSP nominees managed to secure more than 10 percent votes, including YouTuber Tripurari Kumar Tiwary alias Manish Kashyap (17.2 per cent) from Chanpatia seat, and Sarfaraj Alam (16.26 per cent) from the Jokihat seat after completion of counting. Bhojpuri singer Ritesh Pandey also failed to make his presence felt and managed to secure only 7.45 percent votes.
Why JSP failed in Bihar?
According to political observers, Prashant Kishor’s decision to not contest the Bihar Assembly Election proved disastrous for his Jan Suraaj Party, and severely impacted the party’s performance.
Kishor, who floated the JSP last year to emerge as an alternative to Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal- United (JDU) and Lalu Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), had initially announced that will contest from Raghopur against INDIA bloc’s CM face Tejashwi Yadav, but later changed his decision, citing responsibilities to manage the campaign of other JSP candidates.
Additionally, analysts believe Kishor’s JSP failed to galvanise votes in its favour, despite a high-pitched campaign and raising pressing issues such as unemployment, migration and dearth of industries.
What did Jan Suraaj say about Bihar loss?
Meanwhile, in the party’s first reaction to the crushing poll defeat, JSP Bihar president Manoj Bharti argued that his party had gauged that it would either be on top, or all the way at the bottom.
“We wanted to begin a new politics and tell people about the plight in Bihar. We were sure from the initial days that if people understood our points, we would be on the top, otherwise on the bottom,” Bharti said, while admitting that the JSP failed convince people, but would continue its efforts in Bihar.
Notably, JSP founder Prashant Kishor has earlier claimed that his party would win 150 seats, but later asserted it would either be on the top or at the bottom in the seat tally, but that there is no middle ground in the Bihar polls.
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