4 min readPatnaAug 4, 2026 06:17 AM IST First published on: Aug 4, 2026 at 06:16 AM ISTAt the peak of Nitish Kumar’s powers, the BJP consistently retained and swept all four urban Assembly seats in Patna — Patna Sahib, Bankipur, Kumhrar, and Digha. However, that run came to an end on Monday with the party’s loss to Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor from Bankipur.Among the many lessons from the loss, the most important of all perhaps is that the party needs to return to the drawing board instead of “relying solely on social engineering”, a senior leader said. In the initial years, the BJP rode to power on the strength of the social coalition of former CM and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar. Over the past decade, the BJP worked assiduously to graft non-Yadav OBCs and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) onto its traditional upper-caste base through targeted ticket distribution and leadership promotion.AdvertisementAt the same time, the party built a formidable organisational network under Union Home Minister Amit Shah, expanding booth-level reach, deploying full-time pracharaks, and running intensive rural campaigns. Given the financial clout that comes with being in power at the Centre, this gave the party an edge in Bihar.In Bankipur, both its social math and organisational networks failed and the primary task will be identifying and fixing what went wrong. Kishor managed to neutralise the traditional divisions of caste and religion with his cross-sectional appeal. This is what caused a fracture in the BJP’s traditional base, with upper castes said to be unhappy for varied reasons.First, the choice of Samrat Choudhary, who is from the OBC Kushwaha community, as CM. While Nitish managed to act as the glue that held together the coalition of OBCs, EBCs, and upper castes, Choudhary has failed to fill the JD(U) leader’s big shoes. The upper castes have also been unhappy over several other reasons, from the now-stayed UGC regulation on caste discrimination on campuses to the exam paper leaks that have affected children from the upper caste and middle classes as much as OBC and Dalit youngsters. This is what brought many of the youth from these sections, seen as the BJP’s support base, out on the streets during the recent protests, spooking the party.AdvertisementAlso Read | Battle for Bankipur: PK eyes upset on new BJP chief’s turfNow, the party is likely to try and recalibrate its messaging to this core base and figure out how it can pacify it. The upper castes, who formed a significant chunk of the Bankipur electorate, have signalled they are willing to consider alternative options. For the BJP, that poses a dilemma as fulfilling the demands of the upper castes may rub the OBCs and EBCs the wrong way.you may likeThen there is the failure of the BJP’s election management and booth-level organisation that fell apart in front of the Jan Suraaj Party’s strategy of hitting the streets in an attempt at direct outreach to voters where they reside. This allowed Kishor’s party to take its message of change directly to voters while the BJP came across as staid and indifferent — having parachuted in a candidate viewed as an outsider — and with no freshness in its messaging. The party’s insistence on framing the urban constituency as a “durg (fortress)” came across as its arrogance, something Kishor took full advantage of.How the electoral juggernaut that has delivered so many victories over the years is something that the BJP will likely look into closely.