Former election strategist Prashant Kishor on Sunday said his Jan Suraaj campaign will become a political party on October 2, coinciding with Gandhi Jayanti, and contest the Bihar assembly polls next year.
Kishor was addressing a “state-level workshop” of Jan Suraaj here, which was attended by several persons, including two former legislators and a granddaughter of late socialist icon Karpoori Thakur, joining the campaign.
“As stated earlier, Jan Suraaj will become a political party on October 2 and contest next year’s assembly polls. Other details, such as who would lead the party, will be decided in due course,” said Kishor, who had launched the campaign two years ago.
He welcomed the entry of Jagriti Thakur, whose father Virendra Nath Thakur is the younger son of Karpoori Thakur, a former chief minister of Bihar and a Bharat Ratna awardee.
Notably, late Thakur is seen as a mentor to many top leaders of the state, including Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and RJD president Lalu Prasad.
Thakur’s elder son Ram Nath Thakur is a JD(U) MP and a Union Minister of state.
Other notables who joined Jan Suraaj include Monazir Hasan, a former Bihar minister who had been associated with RJD as well as JD(U) and has served multiple terms in Parliament as well as the state legislature.
Other prominent inductees were former RJD MLC Rambali Singh Chandravanshi, who was recently disqualified from the legislative council on grounds of indiscipline, and Anand Mishra, a former IPS officer who resigned from service hoping for a BJP ticket but contested the Lok Sabha polls from Buxar as an Independent after being denied the ticket.
Another entrant was Priyanka, a daughter of JD(U) leader Mangani Lal Mandal, a former MP and an ex-MLA.
Founder of IPAC, a political consultancy firm, Kishor first shot to fame in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls campaign of Prime Minister Narendra, which was a spectacular success.
He also worked for Nitish Kumar in the 2015 assembly polls. Kumar was impressed with his acumen and inducted him into JD(U) in 2018. Kishor was elevated to the post of national vice-president soon, only to be expelled from the party less than two years later.
Kishor, who is in his 40s, gave up political consultancy after 2021 West Bengal assembly polls, which saw his client Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress president, retaining power with a thumping majority.
In 2020, Kishor had launched a campaign in his home state called ‘Baat Bihar Ki”, which got embroiled in a copyrights case and was ultimately shelved.
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