Are Bankipur and Datia bypoll defeats a reality check for BJP?

The BJP has lost two bypolls in states where it enjoys the advantages of incumbency. Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj has secured its first-ever Assembly seat in Bankipur, and the Congress has retained Datia. The twin defeats raise questions about the BJP's dominance even in states where it is in power.

Monday brought a twin shock for the BJP with two bypoll defeats it would not have expected. In Bihar, Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) wrested Bankipur, a seat the BJP had held for more than three-and-a-half decades. In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress held on to Datia. By-elections are mostly written off as no contests because they generally go to the party in power. The BJP is in power in both Bihar and MP, and that is what makes the defeat in the two seats significant.

Of the three seats across three states that went to bypolls, the BJP retained the one in Gujarat. While it lost its seat in Bihar, it failed to wrest the seat in MP from the Congress. The losses raise questions about the BJP's ability to hold on to even its safest turf in states where it is in power.

Prashant Kishor won Bankipur by nearly 19,000 votes, while the Congress's Ghanshyam Singh won Datia in Madhya Pradesh by a margin of over 6,000 votes.

But the bigger story today is Bankipur.

For around 35 years, the constituency in the heart of Patna has been a BJP bastion. BJP state president Nitin Nabin and his father before him represented the seat for multiple terms, making it one of the party's safest urban constituencies in Bihar. The seat fell vacant after Nabin was elected to the Rajya Sabha earlier this year, setting up a contest that assumed significance beyond a single Assembly seat.

For Prashant Kishor and JSP, Bankipur has been a symbolic victory — its first-ever win as a political party. After deciding not to contest the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections — a decision he later acknowledged might have been a mistake — the election marked his first direct electoral test. Jan Suraaj had failed to open its account in last year's Bihar Assembly polls.

The bigger symbolism here, however, is that the JSP did not merely win an Assembly seat, it breached one of the BJP's longest-held urban strongholds. That too happened despite the BJP throwing its organisational weight behind the campaign.

The scale of the BJP's mobilisation shows what was at stake. BJP president Nitin Nabin led an extensive campaign, backed by Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary, local MP Ravi Shankar Prasad, state BJP president Sanjay Saraogi, Union Minister Chirag Paswan, and Bhojpuri stars Manoj Tiwari, Pawan Singh and Maithili Thakur, all campaigning for BJP candidate Neeraj Kumar Sinha.

Nearly 40-star campaigners canvassed for the NDA candidate. Yet the party failed to retain a seat it had come to regard as politically secure. The NDA's campaign led by the BJP also brought in former CM Nitish Kumar to appeal for votes through a video message.

Bankipur also became the first major electoral test after Samrat Choudhary took over as Bihar's first BJP chief minister in April. Retaining Nitin Nabin's long-held stronghold against Prashant Kishor's maiden electoral contest would have reinforced the new chief minister's authority. Instead, the defeat handed his government an early political setback.

DATIA WIN FOR CONGRESS COMPOUNDS POLITICAL MESSAGE

If Bankipur represents a symbolic setback, Madhya Pradesh's Datia compounds the political message.

The Madhya Pradesh bypoll was necessitated by the disqualification of Congress MLA Rajendra Bharti after his conviction in a bank fraud case. Bharti had wrested Datia from senior BJP leader and the state's former Home Minister Narottam Mishra in the 2023 Assembly election, ending the BJP's decade-long hold over the constituency. The bypoll was widely expected to test whether the BJP could reclaim a seat it had dominated before 2023 while governing the state with a comfortable majority.

Instead, the Congress party emerged victorious, denying the BJP an opportunity to regain lost ground.

While Datia does not carry the same symbolic weight as Bankipur, it gives the Congress an important morale boost in a state where it has struggled to mount a sustained political challenge since losing power in 2020.

The twin defeats are noteworthy because they run against the grain of the BJP's juggernaut. The BJP-led NDA is currently governing 21 states and Union Territories.

Assembly bypolls have historically favoured the ruling party or alliance, which typically benefits from superior organisation, greater resources and the ability to leverage incumbency.

In Bihar, the BJP is the senior partner in the ruling NDA. In Madhya Pradesh, it governs with a commanding majority. On paper, both contests appeared to favour the party.

These advantages failed to materialise.

Since the 2024 Lok Sabha election, in which the BJP fell short of securing a majority on its own, questions have persisted about whether the party's once-formidable electoral dominance has begun to soften.

Bypolls are limited contests and should not be read as straightforward predictors of future elections. They are often shaped by local candidates, constituency-specific issues and turnout patterns. They might be a limited experiment by voters who know that it won't lead to any large-scale change in the political set-up.

Yet they remain important political barometers because they test the organisational machinery.

Bankipur, in particular, will attract attention. It was a prestigious contest for the BJP, involving one of its most recognisable state leaders, while also serving as the first major electoral examination of Prashant Kishor's political project.

For the BJP, the challenge is the message these defeats send.

Whether these bypolls mark the beginning of a broader trend will become clear only in subsequent elections. But for now, they have handed the opposition two important victories, given Jan Suraaj Party its first legislative breakthrough, and reminded the BJP that even its strongest fortresses are no longer beyond challenge.

- Ends