NEW DELHI: ‘I will not contest Bihar assembly polls’ Prashant Kishor has declared ahead of the high-octane elections in the state. The founder of Jan Suraaj said the decision was taken by his young political startup for the “common good”.The poll strategist-turned-politician confirmed this in an exclusive interview with PTI.There were speculations that Kishor would contest elections and possibly contest against the RJD scion Tejashwi Yadav in his fort Raghopur. With the release of Jan Suraaj’s second list of 65 candidates on Monday, it was clear that Kishor’s name was missing. Instead, the party has fielded political activist Chanchal Singh against Tejashwi.Meanwhile, Tejashwi is all set to file his nomination papers from Raghopur on Wednesday even as seat-sharing issues within the INDIA bloc remain unresolved.“The party decided that I should not contest the assembly elections. And that is why the party announced another candidate from Raghopur, against Tejashwi Yadav. It was a decision we took in the larger interest of the party. If I contested, it would have distracted me from the necessary organizational work,” Kishor said.Although he is not there, Kishor remains optimistic about his party’s prospects. “I can say with certainty that we will either win comfortably or suffer defeat. I have gone on record saying that I expect a score of either less than 10 seats or more than 150 seats. There is no possibility of anything in between,” he said.He also set a benchmark for success: “A result below 150, even if it is 120 or 130, is a defeat for me.” If we do it well, we will be tasked with transforming Bihar and making it one of the ten most progressive states in the country. If we are not doing well enough, it would mean that people have not shown enough trust in us and we have to continue with our street and social policy (samaj aur sadak ki rajneeti).”Kishor, who recently predicted that JD(U) would struggle to win even “25 seats” in the 243-member Assembly, said about the prospects for the chief minister Nitish KumarThe party has only gotten worse.“The NDA is definitely on the way out and Nitish Kumar will not return as chief minister,” asserted Kishor, who has worked closely with the JD(U) supremo, both as a poll analyst and briefly as a party colleague.“It doesn’t take a psephologist to fathom what lies ahead for the JD(U). In the last assembly polls, just days before the election was announced, Chirag Paswan staged a revolt and fielded candidates, many of them inconsequential, against candidates from Kumar’s party, resulting in their tally plummeting to 43,” recalled Kishor.He added that there was “complete chaos” in the NDA, with uncertainty over which seats the BJP would contest and where the JD(U) would field its candidates.Kishor added: “If the Jan Suraaj Party wins the Bihar polls, it will have a nationwide impact. The compass of national politics will point in a different direction.”The Bihar assembly elections will be held in two phases on November 6 and 11, with counting scheduled for November 14.
