New DelhiDecember 15, 2025 07:41 AM IST
First published on: Dec 15, 2025 at 07:00 AM IST
Nearly a month after the Assembly elections in Bihar in which his Jan Suraaj Party fought against the Mahagathbandhan — of which the Congress is a key constituent — and the BJP, Prashant Kishor is learnt to have had a meeting with senior Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra recently.
While sources in both the parties played down the significance of the meeting, the interaction is politically interesting given that Kishor and the Congress had a bitter parting some years ago. Since then, he has been critical of the Congress, arguing even in the middle of the Bihar campaign that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and Rahul Gandhi’s vote theft campaign was not an electoral issue in the state.
Kishor’s electoral outing, however, turned out to be disastrous with the Jan Suraaj Party drawing a blank, losing the deposits of 236 (or 99.16%) of its total 238 candidates. The Congress fared badly, too, winning just six of the 61 seats it contested, down from 19 in 2020.
Kishor’s past experience with Gandhis
Kishor and the Gandhis have a past, both in his earlier avatar as political strategist and then as a politician. He was in touch with the Gandhi siblings with a proposal to revive the Congress way back in 2021, a year after the JD(U) expelled him. In 2022, a year later, Kishor and the Congress publicly entered into talks.
At a meeting in April 2022, he gave a detailed presentation to the party’s top leadership at Sonia Gandhi’s 10, Janpath residence — Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka were present, and so were many senior leaders — after which Sonia, the then party president, decided to set up a panel to look into his proposals. Kishor was then willing to join the Congress.
Days later, Sonia set up an ‘empowered action group’ to address the Congress’s political challenges even as the party leadership mulled over his proposal. But the talks fell through after Kishor rebuffed the Congress leadership’s offer to him to be part of the group. Kishor wanted more say and a free hand.
“Following a presentation and discussions with Prashant Kishor, Congress president has constituted an Empowered Action Group 2024 & invited him to join the party as part of the group with defined responsibility. He declined. We appreciate his efforts and suggestions given to the party,” the Congress had then said in a statement.
Within minutes, Kishor had hit back: “I declined the generous offer of the Congress to join the party as part of the EAG & take responsibility for the elections. In my humble opinion, more than me, the party needs leadership and collective will to fix the deep-rooted structural problems through transformational reforms.”
The party’s senior leadership, including a group of leaders who went through Kishor’s presentation, were against the party changing its structure at the behest of an outsider who they felt was not entirely trustworthy.