Poll strategist–turned–politician Prashant Kishor suffered a stunning setback as 99 per cent of the candidates fielded by his Jan Suraaj Party lost their security deposits in the 2025 Bihar Assembly election.
Out of 238 contenders, a whopping 236 failed to secure even one-sixth of the winning vote share; the minimum required to retain the Rs 10,000 deposit.
Kishor’s much-hyped electoral debut ended in a complete rout. His party contested 238 of 243 seats, briefly led in four constituencies early on, but eventually failed to win even a single seat.
The final tally was brutal: zero wins, one second-place finish, 122 fourth-place (or worse) finishes, and in 61 seats, Jan Suraaj polled fewer votes than NOTA.
BJP’s Amit Malviya wasted no time highlighting the wipeout, pointing out the 3.34% vote share Jan Suraaj managed out of the 16.77 lakh votes polled; far lower than some exit polls that predicted up to 10% for the debutant party.
While the disastrous performance wasn’t entirely unexpected; most exit polls predicted zero seats; the party also failed to dent the Opposition’s vote share in any significant way.
In its first reaction after the defeat, Jan Suraaj accused Nitish Kumar’s JDU government of diverting Rs 14,000 crore in World Bank funds for election freebies, alleging a massive Rs 40,000 crore splurge aimed at “buying votes.”
The party also claimed that their promise of a Rs 2,000 old-age pension forced the government to raise the amount from Rs 700 to Rs 1,100.
Meanwhile, the BJP-led NDA stormed to a historic victory, winning 202 of 243 seats. The RJD–Congress Mahagathbandhan was decimated, dropping from 110 seats in 2020 to just 35 this time.
Nitish Kumar’s JDU made a strong comeback with 85 seats, and he will be sworn in again as Chief Minister on November 20.
The state saw a record turnout of over 66 per cent across the two-phase polling held on November 6 and 11; the highest since 1951.
