For the BJP, the result in Bankipur goes beyond just a poll loss

No Assembly bypoll has been watched with keener interest than the one that just concluded at Bankipur in Bihar in a resounding victory for Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) leader Prashant Kishor. He challenged the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its fort, winning the seat that’s considered its stronghold since 1995 and was recently vacated by the party’s national president Nitin Nabin, a loss that comes on the heels of the Gen Z protests at the national capital.

For the BJP, losing the Bankipur bypoll goes beyond the more typical loss of a stronghold to probing internal issues and factoring the electorate’s changed demographic profile.

Prashant Kishore’s big win in Bankipur: Key takeaways from the crucial Bihar by-polls | Analysis

Prashant Kishore’s big win in Bankipur: Key takeaways from the crucial Bihar by-polls | Analysis
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The Hindu

Gen Z protests

In Bankipur, nearly a third of voters fall in the urban Gen Z age group, the same cohort as the protesters at Jantar Mantar recently. These youngsters don’t stand alone. Their parents, belonging to a different generation and possibly BJP supporters, have been affected just as much by shrinking opportunities for their children, and the police crackdown on the protests.

It did not help matters much when Mr. Nabin, the BJP’s national president and former five-term Bankipur MLA, termed the Gen Z protesters as “virus[es] and cockroaches, a gang devoted to breaking the country”.

The polls saw a very low turnout at around 34%, almost seven percentage points down from the 2025 Assembly election. Very clearly, from among those who voted for the BJP in 2025, many stayed home or voted for Mr. Kishor.

‘Even dog or cat can win…’

The BJP has had to wait for decades to have its own Chief Minister in Bihar. For years, despite being the party with a stronger organisation and a bigger social base, it needed the social engineering of Backward Classes from the non-Yadav Kurmi-Koeri communities that former Chief Minister and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) supremo Nitish Kumar brought to the table.

In March, Mr. Kumar, said to be ailing, was finally persuaded to give way to the BJP’s Samrat Choudhary as Chief Minister, and retire to a seat in the Rajya Sabha in Delhi. The selection of Mr. Chaudhary, who joined the BJP after stints in the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the JD-U, was not a popular move within the BJP’s Bihar unit. They would have much preferred someone from dyed in the wool of the BJP stable. But Mr. Chaudhary too brought a social base that the BJP wanted to keep. He was picked by the party’s national leadership, with others expected to fall in line.

The BJP’s self-assurance in having its choice of CM endorsed by the people and its own local unit failed to read the brewing discontent, especially after the death of social activist Bharat Tiwari, allegedly at the hands of Bihar Police. Mr. Kishor, in fact, often poked that untreated scab in the BJP cadres’ psyche in his campaign.

This was followed by a change in the BJP’s candidate, with the party replacing Abhishek Bunty with Neeraj Kumar Sinha for some unspecified issue. A stray remark in the midst of the poll, attributed to a BJP leader and later denied by the party, that anyone fielded by the BJP, even a dog or a cat, would be elected in Bankipur, highlighted the sense of hubris.

For the BJP, therefore, a new cohort of Gen Z voters and discontentment over centralised control of the party’s federal units has handed it a loss that will be hard to live down.