PATNA, Aug. 4 -- In a major political upset, Jan Suraaj Party (JSP) founder Prashant Kishor on Monday breached the BJP's three-decade-old stronghold of Bankipur, defeating the party's first-time candidate Neeraj Kumar Sinha by 19,324 votes in a by-election widely seen as a prestige battle for the ruling party. Making his electoral debut, Kishor secured 64,151 votes, while Sinha polled 44,827 after full 32 rounds of counting. RJD candidate Rekha Kumari, the runner-up in the 2025 Assembly election, finished a distant third with 14,273 votes. Last year, Kumari secured 46,363 votes from the Bankipur Assembly constituency. She lost to BJP's Nitin Nabin, who polled 98,299 votes, by a margin of 51,936 votes. NOTA accounted for 646 of the total 1,30,233 votes polled, as per data uploaded on the EC portal at 8.03pm on Monday. The victory marks the first electoral success for Kishor's party after it failed to win any of the 238 seats it contested in the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections. The bypoll was necessitated after BJP national president Nitin Nabin vacated the seat following his election to the Rajya Sabha. Kishor, who had framed the contest as a referendum on the BJP-led government in Bihar and repeatedly targeted chief minister Samrat Choudhary, led from the opening round and steadily widened the margin. He established an early lead of 862 votes after the first round, with the gap continuing to grow throughout the count. The lead dipped marginally only in the fourth round before expanding decisively thereafter. The July 30 bypoll recorded a modest 34.30% voter turnout, with about 1.30 lakh of the constituency's 3,79,616 electors casting their votes, nearly seven percentage points lower than the 41.35% turnout in the 2025 Assembly election. Although 25 candidates were in the fray, the contest effectively remained triangular among Kishor, Sinha and Rekha Kumari. For the BJP, the defeat is a significant symbolic setback. Bankipur, formerly Patna West, had remained with the party continuously since 1995, first under Navin Kishore Prasad Sinha and later his son Nitin Nabin, who represented the seat from the 2006 bypoll and won five consecutive elections. In 2025, Nabin had retained the seat by a margin of over 51,000 votes. The contest was also the first major electoral test after Samrat Choudhary became Bihar chief minister and Nitin Nabin assumed charge as BJP national president. The BJP's campaign suffered an early setback after its original nominee, Abhishek Kumar, withdrew, forcing the party to field Neeraj Kumar Sinha, a former booth-level worker and mandal president, at the last minute. Claiming the verdict as a message to the BJP's central leadership, Kishor said the people of Bankipur had voted for better governance rather than merely electing an MLA. "This is a wake-up call for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bihar needs a chief minister who can improve education, create jobs and stop migration. Our objective is not to become MLAs for contracts but to ensure Bihar's development," he told reporters, while reiterating his demand for a change in the state's leadership. Chief minister Samrat Choudhary congratulated Kishor on his victory. "In the grand festival of democracy, the people have chosen Jan Suraaj in the Bankipur Assembly by-election. I respect the people's verdict and congratulate Prashant Kishor," he said in a post on X. State BJP president Sanjay Saraogi said the party accepted the verdict with humility. "We bow before the will of the people. We will review the reasons behind the defeat, but Bankipur's development will remain our priority," he said. Bihar minister Vijay Kumar Sinha also said the BJP respected the people's mandate and would undertake a detailed review instead of blaming institutions. RJD spokesperson Chitranjan Gagan described the BJP's defeat as more significant than the identity of the winner. He said the verdict reflected public anger against the NDA governments at the Centre and in Bihar despite the BJP deploying its top leadership, Union and state ministers, MPs and thousands of workers during the campaign. He also claimed the electorate had endorsed the issues consistently raised by Tejashwi Yadav and rejected what he termed the BJP's attempt to split anti-BJP votes. Political analysts said the result exposed vulnerabilities in what was once considered the BJP's safest urban constituency. Social scientist and former AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies director DM Diwakar said the defeat showed that the BJP could no longer take its traditional upper-caste and urban support base for granted and that Jan Suraaj had emerged as a credible alternative to both the BJP and the RJD. Political analyst and former Patna University professor Nawal Kishore Chaudhary attributed the defeat largely to candidate selection. "Bankipur did not vote against the BJP as much as it voted against its candidate. The electorate also rejected the party's arrogance in assuming that anyone could win from its strongest bastion simply because of the BJP's name," he said. For Kishor, the victory provides the political legitimacy he had been seeking since entering active politics. For the BJP, losing the constituency that had been synonymous with Nitin Nabin's political legacy for over three decades is likely to trigger serious introspection ahead of the next round of Assembly elections, said experts. The bypoll result, however, will not alter Bihar's political balance, with the ruling five-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) continuing to enjoy a comfortable majority of 201 seats in the 243-member Assembly. The BJP now holds 88 seats, followed by the JD(U) (85), LJP (Ram Vilas) (19), HAM(S) (5) and Rashtriya Lok Morcha (4). The opposition Mahagathbandhan has 35 seats - RJD (25), Congress (6), CPI(ML) Liberation (2), and the CPI(M) and Indian Inclusive Party one each - while the remaining seven seats are held by the AIMIM (5), BSP (1) and the Jan Suraaj Party (1)....