Poll strategist and Jan Suraaj Party founder Prashant Kishor pulled off a stunning electoral debut on Monday by wresting Bihar’s Bankipur seat, which has been a BJP bastion for the past 31 years.Kishor defeated BJP’s Neeraj Kumar by a margin of 19,324 votes in a seat vacated by BJP national president Nitin Nabin after he recently moved to the Rajya Sabha.The Opposition framed the Bankipur outcome as the “beginning of the end of the BJP”, with the party promising to assess the defeat and factors behind it. Overall, the BJP lost bids at power in two of the three bypolls — Bankipur and Madhya Pradesh’s Datia — for which the results were announced today.Manjalpur in Gujarat veered saffron but this win paled in comparison to the loss in Bankipur.The results — the first after Gen Z protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar — have come as a major setback for the BJP, which is in power in both Bihar and Madhya Pradesh where the party nominees lost.That Bankipur in the Patna parliamentary constituency has 33 per cent voters in the 18 to 25 age group complicates matters for the BJP, which continues to be at the receiving end of the student angst led by the Cockroach Janta Party.Bankipur had earlier also witnessed agitations against former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan when the UGC issued its controversial equity guidelines, which were seen as anti-general category students.A Sangh Parivar source said, “The BJP’s core support base has been upset with Dharmendra Pradhan for a while. Bankipur, as most of Bihar, saw a major anti-reservation movement build up after the UGC came up with equity guidelines that left general segment students out of the ambit. Protests at Jantar Mantar have amplified an already latent negative sentiment and today’s results reflect this.”Another factor that appears to have gone against the ruling BJP in Bankipur is the recent encounter of activist Bharat Tiwari of Bhojpur. Tiwari was killed in a police encounter, promoting a wave of anger and demands for a probe into the killing. He had been demanding justice for flood victims.Within the saffron fold, dominant sections unhappy with the installation of Samrat Choudhary as the Chief Minister may also have silently spurred Kishor to victory. Kishor framed most of his campaign against Choudhary.Even today after his win, Kishor, whose party drew a blank in the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, attacked the CM, saying, “The results are a message to the BJP central leadership that they should appoint a good man to lead Bihar and that people do not want someone with a criminal background and questionable conduct.”CM Choudhary, for his part, congratulated Kishor, saying that in the grand festival of democracy, the people have chosen the Jan Suraaj Party. “I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Prashant Kishor ji while respecting the people’s decision,” said Choudhary, whom certain sections within the BJP want replaced as the CM.In MP’s Datia too, BJP candidate Ashutosh Tiwari was unable to surmount the challenge of internal factionalism which marred his campaign right from the word go.Tiwari was fielded by the party after ignoring the claim of former Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra, who got emotional the day the official nominee was publicly launched by the party in a poll rally in Datia. This clouded Tiwari’s poll campaign even though Mishra later campaigned for him.In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat, however, the BJP’s dominance remained intact with the party nominee winning by a margin of 30,630 votes over the nearest Congress rival.