Bihar election: Jan Suraaj of Prashant Kishor releases the second list of 65 candidates but Raghopur remains a mystery

The Prashant Kishor-led Jan Suraaj party announced its second list of sixty-five candidates for the upcoming Bihar meeting election on Monday. Strikingly absent from this new list, was the name of Kishor himself, which is expected to dispute the ballots of high-profile Raghopur constituency against RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav. Kishor confirmed at a press conference that the party has now appointed a total of 116 candidates across the state, and this contributed to the fifty-one individuals mentioned in the first list on October 9. He has a demographic exposition of the candidates announced so far, and he noted that thirty-one belongs to the extremely weak departments, twenty of other back classes (OBCS), and twenty were Muslim candidates. “In the first list, we announced candidates for 51 seats, and in the second list we nominees nominated for 65 seats. Candidates for the remaining seats are announced later,” he said. The party made several significant strategic choices, and Kamlesh Paswan in Harnaut, a seat that has long considered the Bastion of the Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, although the CM has not yet been an election in the Legislative Assembly. The first list of candidates has already mentioned several prominent figures, including former Bihar-Kader IPS officer RK Mishra (for Darbhanga), senior party attorney Yv Giri (for Manjhi), former Patna and Nalanda Open University Vis-Chancellor KC Sinha (for Kumhrar), and the popular Bhojpuri singer ritesh Ranjan Pandey (for Kargahar). The former election strategist has strongly pointed out to run in person for a seat. On October 11, the forty-seven-year-old hit the campaign in Raghopur, the home constituency of Tejashwi Yadav, where he was greeted with an exciting welcome. Kishor publicly promised to deliver a defeat on Yadav, comparable to “Rahul Gandhi’s defeat of Amethi.” During his campaign in the Vaishali district constituency, about fifty kilometers from the capital, Kishor challenged voters with clear questions about the current MLA. He determined, “Your local MLA is such a big man. He has been a deputy minister twice already. Have you ever approached him with your problems?” This provoked answers that suggested that local people struggled to get an audience with thirty-five-year-old Tejashwi Yadav. NDA Ally Suheldev Bharatiya to contest 153 seats in Bihar, the Suheldev Bharatiya Sama Party (SBSP), a member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Uttar Pradesh, announced a major political break on Monday and stated that he would dispute 153 seats in the upcoming Bihar. This decision is directly attributed to the party’s disappointment to be completely excluded from the NDA’s seat arrangement. SCSP secretary Arvind Rajbhar made the announcement and confirmed that the list of candidates will be publicly unveiled at a press conference in Patna on Tuesday. Rajbhar said with reporters about the sidelines of an event in Ballia that the move was needed to use the basis the party had done in the state over almost two decades. “The SBSSP will dispute 153 seats in Bihar. The party has elaborated on its organization in Bihar for the past nineteen years and demonstrates its power through various programs,” he said, confirming that the party’s initial intention was to strengthen the NDA in Bihar, just as in Uttar Pradesh. Mr. However, Rajbhar claims that the NDA’s denial of any seats is based on a ‘negative report’ presented by the BJP’s Bihar unit on the influence of the SCSP. He set out the party’s efforts to secure an agreement and explained that the central leadership – including Home Secretary, AMIT Shah and BJP National President JP NAPDA – had already been warned in May 2025. “We communicated to senior BJP leaders that if an alliance would be completed with the NDA, we would compete; if not, we would compete alone,” he explained. The party, he concluded, waited until Sunday that the case was settled by the NDA’s top decision makers: “We did not want to make a mistake, and so we waited for the decision of the NDA’s top leader. Now we decided that the SBS would dispute 153 seats in Bihar.”