A Politician Sans Politics: Is Prashant Kishor a Third World Elon Musk?

For a politician who is yet to come even close to being in power, Prashant Kishor has an enviable media presence.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Among the many enigmas in Indian politics, the one that of Prashant Kishor is a peculiar one. Management of elections is his mantra, but he is not a man of politics as we know it. He has now become a politician sans politics – yet wants to win elections for his own party. He fancies about exorcising politics from elections.

For a politician who is yet to come even close to being in power, Kishor has an enviable media presence. His life and work are well documented, and his statements are widely covered in both regional and national media.

He is now in the limelight for his protests against the government on the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) issue. Kishor had been in a fast-unto-death since 2 January, demanding the cancellation of the Bihar civil services exam after allegations of a paper leak, which he withdrew after 14 days on 17 January.

Kishor’s intense campaign somewhat overshadowed the efforts of other parties in this episode.

Jan Suraaj chief Prashant Kishor during his indefinite hunger strike demanding the cancellation of the 70th Integrated Combined Competitive (Preliminary) Examination (CCE), 2024, conducted by the BPSC, over allegations of question paper leak, in Patna.

(Photo: PTI)

“A few educated people are watching him,” says Vishnu Narayan, an independent journalist who reports from the ground in Bihar.

“There is a wave being created in the media, which seems big compared to his influence on the ground. It has also not been long since he entered politics.”

Vishnu Narayan, independent journalist

Narayan’s remarks echo a common sentiment among observers: the sustained presence of Prashant Kishor in the mediascape feels more like a result of consistent anticipation than tangible political impact.

In the 2024 Assembly bypolls in Bihar, Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party could put up a fight in only one of the four seats it contested but still came third. After a decade, the anticipation is yet to substantially pay off. However, Kishor is into a long waiting game – and the surety of his presence in Indian politics, barring any disasters, makes it worthwhile to analyse his ideology and personality.

Bihar's Political Status Quo

There is a political stalemate in Bihar.

Both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition have made repeated attempts to disrupt the status quo, only to find themselves reinforcing it. Nitish Kumar remains the sole beneficiary of this enduring stalemate, while others – despite their varying motives – remain eager to overcome it.

Prashant Kishor, too, aspires to be the deadlock-breaker, but he stands apart from his contemporaries. Unlike others, he is not tethered to a specific political tradition or a stable voter bloc.

“He is a political scavenger waiting to feed on the dissolution of the stalemate,” says a political analyst who previously worked with the Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC).

For years, Bihar’s political equilibrium has been underpinned by a unique configuration of caste alliances, voting patterns, and strategic deal-making. Nitish Kumar, much like Emmanuel Macron in France, positioned himself as the stalemate's primary beneficiary, leading the only force capable of swinging the balance. Yet, politics, by its very nature, seeks to resolve stalemates. Kishor appears acutely aware of this and recognises that Bihar’s reality is bound to shift eventually.

Kishor’s political trajectory is marked by his reliance on lateral entry. He sought lateral entry into the BJP, then into the Janata Dal United [JD(U)], and later into the Congress, and now his eyes are set on a post-Nitish political scene in Bihar.

A file photo of Nitish Kumar with Prashant Kishor during the 2015 Bihar Assembly elections.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

The strategy reflects his broader approach to governance: bypassing conventional routes to power and making “people sit in the collectorate without clearing UPSC exams”.

For Kishor, lateral entry is a means to infuse accountability and efficiency into a stagnant system. “Retired bureaucrats are attracted to him as they want to develop their political capital,” says Dr Mulayam Singh Yadav, an emerging academic from Jawaharlal Nehru University and youth leader of the Samajwadi Party. “They can also bring in money.”

From the BJP to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) – the parties with whom Kishor has worked with, he has advised them to bring in talent through various lateral entry schemes, a source reveals, adding that “he hates nothing like caste politics”.

His fixation with lateral entry for himself and for ‘talents’ like him into positions of power is perhaps derived from the dislike for caste politics and its close association with the reservation system in India. Thus, Kishor as a lateral entry politician and as an advocate of lateral entry system in governance is an anti-reservation politician par excellence.

Dr Yadav, based on his inputs from grassroots Bahujan activists in Bihar, suspects that the true consequence of his politics would be “helping the BJP to gain a single party majority in Bihar at the expense of the JD(U) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), hence his appeals to Extremely Backward Class and minority voters and attempts to field rebel candidates from non-BJP parties – a lot of money being pumped in for that purpose”.

Bihari American in Indian Politics?

Ironically, the fiercely individualistic and meritocratic personality of Prashant Kishor can best be understood through social factors. His worldview is shaped by a unique confluence of his professional trajectory, caste identity, and personal experiences.

At the heart of Kishor’s political outlook is his fascination with American-style politics as he sees it. In private, Kishor prefers the term social security over social justice, says a source.

He is a Bihari American in his disposition, with all its uniqueness and strangeness. It is no coincidence that the 2014 Modi campaign, under Kishor’s supervision, was styled as India’s first presidential election campaign by a prime minister candidate. His party explicitly wishes to follow the American model of candidates being selected by the public.

This Americanism is also reflected in Kishor’s longstanding preferences for efficiency, data-driven strategies, and a belief in the power of individuals over systems. His background as the son of a doctor and as a former UN public health professional might also have been pivotal in shaping this worldview: he married a doctor and still remains the ‘son of a doctor’ who happened to be in politics.

He explains election outcomes as being influenced by waves, storms, and environments, mirroring the medical word view of a healthcare professional.

In his mind, moreover, a slightly better way of doing things could make all the difference – a belief pervasive in the health sector. This drives his obsession with suraaj or good governance.

Kishor exhibits a strong contempt for what he perceives as the mediocrity of traditional politicians. His vision is rooted in an elitist meritocracy, where politics is approached with the precision and calculation of a bureaucratic technocrat rather than the instincts of a grassroots leader.

His entry from political consultancy into electoral politics is reminiscent of the Brahmin police officer in the movie Article 15, who is forced to venture into the mud in order to save a child. The scene where he does so, with his unwilling lower-caste colleagues watching on, is presented as a triumphant moment.

In Kishor’s case, however, “there is no particular moment when he decided to make the switch,” says a senior political consultant who worked with him. “He has been going back and forth between consultancy and politics.”

Prashant Kishor “has an administrative approach to politics,” says another former employee of I-PAC. The idea is to manage information asymmetry in bureaucracy, and the utopia is controlled compartmentalisation of knowledge. Kishor recognised early on that full information is never available to anyone in the spectrum, and the only way out was to smartly play with the information gaps. The key was to get the work done, not to understand everything correctly.

“He is a utilitarian and an opportunist,” says the political analyst, summing up Kishor’s philosophy with brutal clarity. “For the right price, he goes with anyone. He will go even with [AIMIM President Asaduddin] Owaisi if offered the deputy chief minister post.”

For Kishor, opportunism is pragmatism, a necessary condition for navigating the volatile landscape of Indian politics. Kishor does not place a high premium on loyalty, and instead, sees it as a weakness in a politician. “Right after I-PAC’s successful campaigns for the TMC and the DMK, scores of people were fired,” says the former employee. “This disposable attitude is inherent in him.”

His phonebook is supposedly a network of extensive contacts across fields, people whom he can call upon for his needs.

Kishor is a true product of a network society, in whose world such connections become exponentially more effective as they accumulate. His recruitment strategies prioritise individuals from eminent institutions and accomplished backgrounds, adding to his network. “He is a person of rankings,” remarks the political analyst. “He takes positions and ranks seriously, almost fanatically.”

Above all, Prashant Kishor is a Brahmin capitalist than a politician. In India, there was no one who could professionally handle elections. He became one of the first to offer it, and the product he offered mattered.

Contrary to the built-up persona of Kishor, it was not his political brilliancy that mattered in the successful election campaigns he led, rather it was his entrepreneurial spirit. This conflation, however, explains much of his political ideology.

Prashant Kishor and the Ideology of Electionism

Prashant Kishor is an exemplar of public-private partnership (PPP). His organisation, I-PAC, designed flagship quasi-PPP schemes in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, among other states, which blurred the distinction between government and political consultancy, and between public policy and electioneering.

By intertwining governance with electioneering, Kishor has fundamentally altered the nature of public policy, making it election-oriented and campaign-centric. Here, election campaigns do not merely precede elections; they span the entire calendar year, turning policy itself into a campaign.

This phenomenon can be encapsulated in the term ‘electionism’ – an ideology Kishor has both crafted and fallen victim to, which in turn allows him to perceive himself as a kingmaker in politics.

Electionism is built on a double reductionism: that politics can be reduced to elections, and elections to election campaigns.

This reductionist logic elevates elections – and, by extension, election campaigns – to a special position in political history. In this framework, an effective administrator of election campaigns, like Kishor himself, may begin to believe that their role transcends the mundane realities of politics and places them in history’s spotlight. This self-perception fuels an almost mythic sense of purpose.

Kishor is not driven by a desire for immediate power but by a will to posterity – the idea that his contributions will be marked in history. Thus, Kishor, the entrepreneurial political consultant who was a representative of capitalist spirit in Indian politics, has graduated into a politician who is a self-portrayed symbol of the metaphysical in politics.

He also exemplifies a common phenomenon among administrators in third-world bureaucratic systems: the tendency to mistake institutional success for personal power.

His achievements in election campaign administration – marked by efficiency, innovation, and precision – led him to believe that he could command the very processes that he only helped to streamline so far. This is a familiar delusion, often observed among academics, bureaucrats, managers, or army officers, who mistake the success of the machinery of their institutions for their own individual success. Thus, the work of I-PAC, which is a product of all its workers, has been portrayed as Kishor’s mythical contribution. This is exactly how capitalist charisma is created and propagated – be it of Steve Jobs’ or Prashant Kishor’s – by personalising collective achievements.

Kishor’s role in election campaign administration brought capitalist energy and technological innovation to a domain traditionally suspect for its erratic rhetoric and patron-client systems.

“His skill is to make a wave bigger when he joins in it,” says the analyst. “He can magnify the victory of a side that is already poised to win.”

Kishor transformed elections into a finely tuned operation, where data analytics, media strategies, and micro-management worked in concert. His success in this space was undeniable, but it also planted a dangerous seed: the belief that the majestic force of the election machinery was synonymous with his own abilities. A good coach cannot forget that he ultimately needs a talented pupil. Kishor in politics is like a coach competing in sprints by himself, instead of his trainee.

The rise of electionism as a dominant subterranean ideology in Indian politics is where one can trace Kishor’s true stamp.

It inevitably reshapes governance, turning public policy into a function of campaign strategy. Governance under this ideology becomes transactional, prioritising optics and voter impressions over structural transformation. Policy decisions are tailored to fit campaign narratives, reducing governance to an ongoing exercise in electoral persuasion. In this model, elections do not merely interrupt governance – they define it.

This election-oriented approach to governance carries significant implications. Electionism treats the foundational aspects of politics – the contest for authority among social groups – as administratively manageable hurdles rather than systemic challenges.

By doing so, it seeks to reduce the deeply rooted dynamics of Indian society to problems of mere management, solvable with data and strategy. The complexities of caste, for instance, are subordinated to the rhetoric of merit and good governance. The message is that, at the end of the day, we need good governance; after all, not everyone, if at all, can get a job through reservations.

The Inorganic Symbolism of Jan Suraaj

Prashant Kishor’s persona and politics are a hodgepodge of contradictory ideas, drawn from various ideological and programmatic traditions. These contradictions, however, are intentional.

His approach relies on post hoc coherence – a narrative that only makes sense in retrospect, after the success of the programme. For Kishor, the goal is not to present a coherent ideology but to craft one that fits the moment, ensuring relevance in a fragmented political landscape.

Among the people who inspire Kishor are Pratap Singh Kairon, who represents the ideal of an efficient administrator, and Jayaprakash Narayan, for his ability to mobilise people. But Kishor remains strategically silent about them in public.

Kairon, while admired for his administrative prowess, lacks emotional resonance with the electorate. Jayaprakash Narayan, on the other hand, is already a deeply claimed figure in Bihar’s political imagination, leaving little room for Kishor to establish himself as a distinctive successor. Associating too closely with Narayan would tether Kishor to a legacy that drowns him rather than elevates him.

Instead, Kishor has turned to an easily sellable figure: Mahatma Gandhi. His decision to launch his party on 2 October, Gandhi’s birth anniversary, underscores this deliberate effort to place himself in the Gandhian mould.

At the same time, he promises an end to the liquor ban in Bihar, presumably to appeal to the male sentiment in the state. His party seems set to position itself in the left-of-center, regurgitating accepted rhetoric around social justice and development. The party’s flag features Ambedkar and Gandhi together.

If all this sounds somewhat forced, tired, and repetitive, it is because they are. For all his success as an administrator, Kishor has not led a movement that has organically inspired its own iconography and symbolism.

This does not bode well for him, especially with ruling parties nearly always being products of popular movements, be they regional or national.

If Jan Suraaj does not get a big breakthrough, it doesn’t cancel the success of Kishor as an election administrator – only his career as a politician.

But his legacy in political consultancy has also taken a beating, as the field moves ahead without him. “He considered all the people who started with him as his boys. Now they have all moved away from him and started their own things,” says the political analyst.

“He is now seen as a figurative fountainhead, a glacier, that gave birth to things.”

As much as Kishore forsaken his close associates as he moved forward from one project to another, they have reciprocated as well, some with equal success. There is political consultancy in India, beyond and after Kishor. He still has a halo, primarily in his own mind, and among his journalist friends.

Third World Elon Musk?

Kishor is a quintessential capitalist politician who abhors the messy world of democratic politics. Fittingly, one may find parallels to Kishor’s capitalist charisma in the US. On the outset, he looks like a failed Elon Musk minus big capital, big technology, and Donald Trump; in other words, is Prashant Kishor a Third World Musk?

He might have failed to become a Musk for Indian/Bihari reasons; some say Amit Shah prevented him from usurping the second-in-command position in the first Modi government. Or perhaps, there is a case to be made that he is more like Vivek Ramaswamy, the Kerala American Brahmin capitalist whose politics is defined by meritocratic-ideological opposition towards affirmative action in America, and support for injection of private capitalist spirt into public administration.

Like Musk and Ramaswamy, Kishore too is inspired by the notion of ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) – a neoliberal tenet against welfare state. His promised suraaj is likely DOGE rendered in Hindi.

In any case, by first dismissing the caste entirely and then pragmatically negotiating with it, Kishor has shown some flexibility. However, his real political home would likely only be found once Nitish Kumar ages, dies, or becomes irrelevant.

As much as his fate as a political consultant was tied to the rise of Modi, his fate as a politician would be entwined with the political demise of Nitish Kumar.

Ironically, one can’t blame history if it judges his merit as a political consultant in juxtaposition with his merit as a politician. A successful political consultant may not be a successful politician and vice versa. If he is to find his place as a politician in Indian history, he needs to go beyond his mastery in election campaign administration, and develop mastery in politics, like Lalu Prasad Yadav does.

That cannot happen without a politician having organic ties with a social group, which is Kishor’s weak spot – he is too self-obsessed to be identified with any social group.

Unlike America, Bihar is a difficult place to be an uprooted politician.

(Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at PP Savani University, Surat. He holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)