Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor registered a thumping victory in the byelection to Bihar's Bankipur assembly constituency, which was considered to be a bastion of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Kishor defeated BJP's Neeraj Kumar by 19,324 votes in the Assembly bypoll as the saffron party suffered a major setback in the constituency, which was a stronghold of the now-party chief Nitin Nabin.
According to the Election Commission of India (ECI), Kishor secured 64,151 votes, while Kumar got 44,827 votes. Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) candidate Rekha Kumari, on the other hand, is a distant third, with 14,273 votes. The bypoll marked Kishor's first direct electoral battle after launching the Jan Suraaj Party, making the win one of the key ones.
Why was the bypoll necessitated?
The election was necessitated after BJP national president Nitin Nabin resigned from the Assembly seat in April following his election to the Rajya Sabha. Nabin had won the Bankipur seat for the fourth consecutive time in November 2025, defeating his nearest rival Rekha Gupta of the RJD by a margin of over 50,000 votes. The RJD has once again fielded Gupta in the bypoll.
The contest gained significance as Prashant Kishor, a former poll strategist who launched the Jan Suraaj Party, made his electoral debut. The BJP, which has not lost the seat since 1995 when the constituency was known as Patna West, fielded its youth wing leader Neeraj Kumar Sinha to retain the stronghold.
What happened in Bankipur in the 2025 assembly elections?
Nitin Nabin won Bankipur in the 2025 Bihar elections with 98,299 votes, a commanding 62.66% vote share, against RJD's Rekha Kumari, who polled 46,363 votes and 29.55 per cent. The lead of over 51,000 votes is one of the biggest margins in the seat's recent history. While the RJD is looking to narrow the gap this time and clinch the seat.
Meanwhile, a low voter turnout of over 34 per cent was registered on Thursday in the by-poll to Bihar's Bankipur assembly seat where Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor, who was making his electoral debut, challenged decades of BJP dominance. According to the EC, the voter turnout stood at only 34.24 per cent, a drop of more than seven per cent compared with 41.45 per cent in the assembly polls of November last year.
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