Corporate Republic of Bihar

When Narendra Modi rose to the national stage in 2014, Prashant Kishor also drifted out from the smoke of anonymity. Bihar, was long known for its odd industry- the production of civil servants. Its special economic zone was bureaucratic corridor. The arrival of Prashant Kishor paved the way for a new imagination which yielded no philosopher but the architect of power itself.

Arvind N Das, a noted historian had once called it the Republic of Bihar. An interchangeable usage of the Republic and the Jungle Raj was quite common in the underworld of the media. Then Bihar started to imagine itself as a federated being of India. As India was to the world, Bihar became the same to India. This imagination operated at two levels. One was rooted in the pride of the past. India imagined itself as a land of ancient wisdom. Bihar looked up to fragments of it either in the form of Magadh or Gupta empire. The second was marked by absence. Just as India struggled to build social capital in the global arena, Bihar grappled with its own deficit within the nation.

Amid these absences, Prashant Kishor dressed Modi as a political mythology. This formula soon found resonance beyond Delhi. In Bihar, he helped Nitish Kumar reclaim power in 2015, that too without the BJP’s backing. From there, his influence rippled across India’s diverse political landscape. He steered Captain Amarinder Singh’s victory in Punjab in 2017, guided Jagan Mohan Reddy’s triumph in Andhra Pradesh in 2019 and shaped Mamata Banerjee’s comeback in West Bengal in 2021. Ironically, all these states despite being federated are ideologically and culturally way too distant. The playbook of one man seemed to hold a talisman for power.

Prashant Kishor seeks to defy fixed ideological taxonomy. He speaks the language of the Left, invokes equality and the dignity of the Maati (Soil of Bihar) and yet his gestures are tactically appealing to the right-wing aspirations. He denotes empowering the marginalized but connotes urban elites. This porosity allows him to jettison BJP’s overt autocratic activism and the Opposition’s inertia.

To understand Kishor’s paradox, Karl Marx offers an unlikely optic. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx observed how history repeats itself- first as tragedy, then as farce. Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise had the tragic grandeur of revolution turning into empire. His nephew Louis Bonaparte re-enacted the same performance as political theatre.

Modi’s ascent in 2014 carried the aura of that first act. A man from the periphery had reimagined himself as the redeemer of the nation. Prashant Kishor was his mythmaker. Now Prashant Kishor has become the echo of his own myth. In that sense, Modi is India’s Napoleon who keeps invoking the communal spirit of polarisation. Kishor, in contrast, is his Louis Bonaparte, a figure repeating the revolution as farce, turning the epic into a brand story.

His speeches in Bihar often blend technocratic logic with moral catchphrases. He paints the state as a paradox just like most educated Biharis do. According to NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, Bihar ranks at the bottom. Kishor interprets this not as a structural legacy of feudalism or caste but as a failure of will. What he means that Biharis make other states through their labour and in the process, they ‘unmake’ Bihar. But this verdict, however, flattens history. Bihar’s poverty is not born of apathy but of long-standing hierarchies of upper-caste bureaucracies and elite patronage. Out-migration is just an economic crisis of this. The state, as some critics note, has followed Macaulay’s blueprint- ‘Babu in thought, Bihari in colour.’ Euphemistically speaking, Bihar stands out to be an apostrophe of postcolonial mimicry.

Can Prashant Kishor truly penetrate Bihar’s already saturated political landscape? The answer, it seems, is unlikely. As Marx reminds us, history does not repeat itself endlessly, not even as farce. Kishor now struggles to find footing in a soil that no longer responds to charisma or calculation. Much like Arvind Kejriwal, whose rise was fuelled in part by urban Bihari voters of Delhi, Kishor confronts a political moment where the old allures can’t be intoned over and over again. Media myths, after all, cannot be reborn indefinitely.

Can Bihar’s deep-rooted caste hierarchies ever find reconciliation? Prashant Kishor, like Gandhi, impetrates the upper castes to be patronising to the lower castes. Yet history reminds us that such benevolence is itself root of all problems. Caste exists precisely because of this patronising order. What Kishor seems to seek, then, is not the annihilation of caste, but inhibition of its conflict. In this, he mirrors an edgy democracy itself. His foreboded equality thrives on inequality. His rejects all ideologies and believes that governance is an engineering problem. What he forgets that even this engineering is a social engineering in a new mask.

To the mainstream media, Prashant Kishor is a political reformer who calculates like a businessman. In every few years, Indian democracy looks for a messiah who can make politics look more managerial. Till now media kept chasing Kejriwal or Modi. Now it is orbiting Prashant Kishor for political renewal both as an architect and artifact in which strategy is itself the substance and the power.

When Arvind N Das referred to ‘the Republic of Bihar’ he meant a benighted state which precipitated ‘economic backwardness, social inequity, electoral banditry, political cupidity, caste riots and cultural degeneration.’ Now with the advent of technocrats and engineers, benighted-ness lies hidden, turning the republic of Bihar into the ‘Corporate Republic of Bihar.’

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