The outsider’s paradox of Prashant Kishor and the curse of power
By now, it’s clear that Prashant Kishor doesn’t do half-measures. The man who once sold dreams to political parties has now decided to script his own. Having been shown the door from the BJP’s back room powermasters, he went freelance, turning political consultancy into a billion-rupee cottage industry. He taught parties how to sell themselves to the public. Now, he’s trying to sell himself. For months, Kishor has been trudging through Bihar, conducting his “padayatra” like a modern Chanakya on foot, pitching his walk through Bihar as not just a political campaign but as a pilgrimage of belief, an attempt to convert scepticism into structure. His men fan out like monks of modernity, measuring moods, mining data, and mapping discontent. But the soil of Bihar and of India blooms in myth, caste, and memory, not metrics. Kishor’s pitch is of the honest outsider, the uncorrupted insider of the electoral machine. But we’ve seen this movie before.
Every generation births its own political outsider, and every one of them ends up being consumed by the very beast they set out to tame. Arvind Kejriwal was the archetype—a man of coughing stature and street fights, who rose like a middle-class messiah against corruption, only to become an emblem of the very authoritarianism he once raged against. Kanhaiya Kumar, the eloquent JNU rebel, tried to play both sides and was crushed between them. Decades earlier, Assam’s Prafulla Kumar Mahanta turned student energy into a movement, into government, into hubris, and then into political ruin. Ladakh’s Sonam Wangchuk, with his monkish engineering and ecological idealism, now finds himself on the receiving end of Delhi’s wrath for daring to speak up. The pattern is almost mythic. Kishor’s gamble is different in only one respect that he knows the machinery from within. He built it. He knows where the screws loosen and which buttons trigger hysteria. If politics is a game of perception, then Kishor is one of its finest illusionists. He doesn’t speak the language of ideology; he speaks the language of outcome. But in India, when the outsider becomes an insider, his moral advantage evaporates. For the ruling party at the Centre, historically, has never tolerated strong, mass-based outsiders. For Delhi, there can be only one centre of gravity. Every other orbit must be drawn in or spun out. For Kishor, the question is not whether he can win Bihar, but whether he can resist the slow seduction of power should it become his, and begins to smile upon him. His project Jan Suraaj is a good-governance utopia that sounds like a TED Talk written in Maithili. His idea to transcend caste and clientelism is noble, perhaps even necessary. Kishor probably imagines a clean republic born from a venal system as an utopia of efficiency, honesty, and order in a land addicted to chaos. It is a seductive proposition: a politics without politicians. Yet history tells us that such revolutions, whether in Plato’s Republic or Lenin’s Russia, tend to recreate what they resist.
Still, to dismiss Kishor as a freelance ambition artist would be folly. Bihar’s soil has a strange sympathy for men who mix intellect with insurgency. Lohia, JP, Lalu, Nitish; each, in his own way, rebelled against the script. Kishor might yet channel that ancestral impulse, not as a messiah but as a mirror reflecting the exhaustion of old parties and the hunger for new voices. In every age and empire, there walks a man who believes he can outthink power. Prashant Kishor may be that man for our time. He has mapped the mechanics of democracy like a master cartographer. But the map is not the territory, and power, as every philosopher of history knows, is a force that bends all designs to its own will. The sword and the smile are but two faces of the same power. If Kishor can resist that gravitational pull and turn his strategic mind into moral muscle and his ambition into endurance, he may yet carve a new idiom of Indian politics. But if not, he will join the long procession of men who mistook reform for revolution and were devoured by both.
History is a cruel tutor. For power, as Machiavelli warned, rewards cunning but punishes control. The philosopher Nietzsche warned that whoever fights monsters must take care not to become one. Kishor has fought the monster long enough to know its habits. Kishor has known the monster long enough to know its hunger. The question is whether he still remembers what it looks like from the outside. The other question is whether he still remembers what it means to stand outside its shadow and light it up.