Bankipur Reveals The Politics Of Refusal And Rejection

By K Raveendran

Bankipur may eventually be remembered not as the constituency that discovered Prashant Kishor, but as the first place where the anger dramatised by the Cockroach Janta Party acquired an electoral address. The distinction is crucial. Kishor’s victory does not amount to popular acceptance of a coherent alternative to Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party or the political order built around them. It is, instead, an unmistakable act of rejection — a vote cast less for a destination than for an exit.

That makes Bankipur more consequential than an ordinary by-election upset, though not yet proof that the Modi era is ending. One constituency cannot establish a national transition. By-elections magnify local grievances, candidate personalities and organisational lapses. Yet Bankipur was not an interchangeable seat. The BJP had dominated it and its predecessor constituency for more than three decades. Its loss to a politician whose party had failed to win a single seat in the Bihar Assembly election only months earlier gives the result an importance beyond arithmetic.

Kishor’s gambit succeeded precisely because the voter did not demand from him the ideological completeness normally expected of a national challenger. Jan Suraaj remains an unfinished political proposition. Its vocabulary of governance, education, employment and Bihar’s renewal is persuasive but broad. Kishor has not built an alternative economic model, a distinctive social coalition or a national doctrine capable of replacing Modi’s fusion of welfare, nationalism, centralised leadership and cultural politics.

Bankipur voters appear to have overlooked that deficiency because the immediate political impulse was not to choose a fully formed replacement. It was to puncture permanence.

This is where the cockroach effect becomes relevant. The insult from which the protest movement drew its name was transformed into a badge of collective defiance. Students and unemployed young people who were accustomed to being treated as statistics, petitioners or examination candidates began behaving as an autonomous political constituency. They did not wait for an established party to certify their grievance. They did not seek a charismatic saviour before assembling. They converted ridicule into solidarity and social media visibility into pressure on the state.

The Jantar Mantar agitation altered the political atmosphere because it extracted concessions without entering the conventional electoral marketplace. The movement forced examination failures, paper leaks, unemployment and institutional accountability into the centre of political discussion. Its success demonstrated that a government skilled in controlling the national narrative could still be made to retreat when faced with sustained, decentralised and morally intelligible pressure.

The ‘cockroach mentality’ should therefore not be understood as devotion to the CJP or obedience to its leaders. It is a refusal to remain politically disposable. It represents citizens who are willing to survive institutional neglect, mockery and administrative indifference, but are no longer willing to do so silently. Like the creature invoked in the slur, the movement’s strength lies in persistence rather than elegance, dispersion rather than hierarchy, and an ability to return after attempts to dismiss it.

Bankipur may be the first endorsement of that attitude through the ballot. Kishor benefited because he positioned himself at the intersection of accumulated resentment and available electoral choice. His campaign focused on children’s futures, education, employment and the failure of inherited political loyalties to improve everyday life. That language closely echoed the anxieties energising the youth agitation, even though Jan Suraaj did not create the agitation and cannot claim ownership of it.

The result consequently belongs only partly to Kishor. His political skill, visibility and neighbourhood-level campaigning mattered. So did his willingness to contest a BJP fortress after Jan Suraaj’s humiliating Assembly performance. But the larger force was an electorate newly prepared to use an imperfect instrument to deliver an exact message. Voters did not have to believe that Kishor could govern the country. They needed only to believe that his victory would disturb those who had begun to regard their support as permanent.

That is a dangerous development for the BJP because Modi’s dominance has rested not merely on winning elections, but on shaping the range of imaginable outcomes. Opponents were often forced to campaign inside a political universe defined by him. The BJP’s organisation, welfare machinery, ideological clarity and communication system produced an aura of inevitability. Even dissatisfaction could coexist with the belief that no viable challenger existed.

The cockroach effect attacks that aura from below. It does not begin by establishing another towering leader. It begins by persuading voters that the ruling arrangement can be defeated in one university dispute, one protest negotiation, one social media confrontation and one constituency at a time. Once invincibility is broken into local episodes, national dominance becomes psychologically negotiable.

Yet it would be premature to describe Bankipur as the beginning of the end of Modi in any deterministic sense. The BJP retains formidable advantages: organisational depth, ideological commitment, resources, a broad welfare constituency and a leader whose political connection with large sections of the electorate has repeatedly survived economic stress and opposition campaigns. The party can also absorb local setbacks, modify its messaging and appropriate the language of youth aspiration.

Nor does the protest mood automatically favour Kishor. The CJP’s decision to remain outside electoral politics preserves its credibility and makes it difficult for any party to convert the agitation into captive support. Young voters animated by examination scandals and unemployment may vote differently across states, castes and contests. Their revolt is against unaccountable authority, not necessarily for Jan Suraaj.

This is precisely why the development is more unsettling for established parties. The emerging constituency is politically available but not politically owned. It may support Kishor in Bankipur, the Congress elsewhere, a regional party in another state or an independent candidate who appears capable of punishing complacency. Its loyalty is conditional, impatient and transactional. It does not necessarily seek ideological consistency; it seeks demonstrable accountability.

For the opposition, Bankipur offers both encouragement and warning. The encouragement is that BJP strongholds are penetrable when politics is connected to lived grievance. The warning is that traditional opposition formations may not be the automatic beneficiaries. A political class that treats public anger merely as anti-BJP capital could find itself rejected alongside the ruling party.

The deeper meaning of Bankipur is therefore not that Prashant Kishor has emerged as the next Modi. It is that a section of the electorate may no longer be waiting for a next Modi. The politics born at Jantar Mantar is suspicious of grand substitutes. It is comfortable with temporary vehicles, decentralised pressure and selective punishment.

The Modi era began with the concentration of hope in a singular leader. Its erosion, should it occur, may take the opposite form: the dispersal of political agency among citizens unwilling to surrender themselves to another comprehensive promise. Bankipur is not the end of that era. It is the first credible suggestion that its eventual end may arrive not through one majestic alternative, but through millions of small acts of refusal. (IPA Service)