Bihar chief minister Samrat Choudhary has been at the centre of Prashant Kishor’s attack ever since he embarked on his campaign for the 2025 state assembly polls. Kishor sharpened his offensive against Choudhary when he himself entered the fray in the Bankipur bye-election in Patna.Now, after winning what was believed to be an “impregnable” fortress of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Kishor is demanding that the Hindutva party’s leadership replace Choudhary – a man of “criminal antecedents and a symbol of Jungle raj” – with a “kabil, imandaar aur yogya (able, honest and qualified)” leader as chief minister. “Our battle against Samrat Choudhary will continue till the BJP’s central leadership replaces him as the CM. We have no issue if the BJP wishes to have a CM from the Kushwaha caste. But it should pick an honest and able leader, which the Kushwaha community has in abundance. The Jan Suraj Party’s demand to replace Choudhary is non-negotiable,” Kishor said in virtually all his interviews with different news channels. Why is Choudhary central to Kishor’s campaign?Choudhary faces a court order framing charges against him in connection with the massacre of seven persons belonging to the Kushwaha community in the 1990s. He has also faced allegations of showing different dates of birth in court records and election affidavits, documents which are in the public domain and are frequently cited by Kishor. Questions have also been raised about the lack of transparency surrounding his educational qualifications.But are allegations of crime and forgery the sole reason behind Kishor’s seemingly relentless campaign to oust Choudhary from Bihar’s “throne”? Why Choudhary is so important to the BJP leadership is evident from the fact that he became the party’s first chief minister in Bihar.And more importantly, the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah leadership chose him to replace Nitish Kumar, who had served as chief minister for over 20 years before making way for BJP in April this year. It was a “proud moment,” particularly for Union home minister Amit Shah, who was in the vanguard of his party’s campaign in the 2025 elections and worked doggedly to replace Nitish with a BJP chief minister. Is it feasible for the BJP leadership to give in to Kishor’s demand and replace Choudhary, a leader presented as a ‘milestone’ in the saffron party’s historical journey in Bihar?Heat on Choudhary; the real target appears to be ShahA close examination of Kishor’s journey, particularly his interview with Manish Kumar for DeKoder after winning Bankipur, helps in decoding the contours of his politics. By training his gun on Choudhary, Kishor seems to be actually targeting Shah in particular, and more broadly, the edifice of Hindutva politics. Kishore said: “It was Amit Shah who didn’t respond to Nitish Kumar’s dignified gesture with folded hands after demitting the office of CM and moving to the Rajya Sabha. I have criticised several of Nitish’s policies. But the fact remains that he had been the CM of Bihar for 20 years; courtesy demanded that Shah stood in ovation for the leader who was bidding adieu to his office as a CM. It amounted to insulting Bihar.”However, what was more remarkable, and a revelation of sorts, was Kishor’s perspective on Bankipur, an urban seat populated by Bihar’s elites and a pocket borough of the BJP since the 1995 elections. Even when Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Janata Dal swept united Bihar in the 1995 Assembly elections and won the majority on its own in the 324-member state assembly, BJP’s Nabin Sinha and Nitin Nabin’s father won Bankipur, then known as Patna West. Sinha continued winning the seat till he died prematurely. Thereafter, his son, Nitin Nabin, won it consecutively for five terms before vacating it to move to the Rajya Sabha, allowing Kishor to wrest the seat in the bye-election. Nitin won Bankipur even in 2015, when the Lalu Prasad Yadav-Nitish Kumar alliance effectively decimated the BJP in the rest of Bihar.“The political reality in the rest of Bihar is different. But the BJP nursed Bankipur as a laboratory of Hindutva. It has Sabjibagh, a Muslim-populated area. Maximum number of Ram Navami processions were brought out in Bankipur to consolidate the Hindus against the Muslims. It suited the BJP’s politics that the Hindus and Muslims get divided and vote separately,” Kishor told DeKoder.Kishor’s statement pinpoints the “core” of BJP’s politics and hammers on it with precision. His victory in Bankipur is significant because, for the first time since 1990, Muslims joined the so-called “upper-caste” Hindus in voting collectively for the Jan Suraaj Party’s nominee against the BJP.Kishor’s success in nearly 400 of the constituency’s 428 polling booths suggests that people from all sections of the society – caste Hindus, Yadavs, Koris, Kurmis, Dalits and Muslims – rallied behind him.This is, therefore, not merely the defeat of a BJP candidate in Bankipur, but also a challenge to the very soul on which the party had grown its banyan tree.Between the devil and the deep blue seaThe BJP leadership is yet to fully recover from the resignation of former Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the face of Gen Z-led protests against the systemic rot in India’s education system. If the BJP succumbs to Kishor’s demand of dispensing with Choudhary, it will amount to owning the responsibility of foisting a man of dubious antecedents as the chief minister of Bihar. And if it persists with Choudhary, Kishor will likely keep fuelling his fire against him. The party, thus, appears to be caught between “the devil and the deep blue sea.”Kishor has generally kept his political strategy away from the street and mass movements. Yet, having successfully strategised election campaigns of top Indian leaders from different ideological streams, he also seems to have a fair understanding and appreciation of the youth movement.When asked whether the BJP would eventually succeed in quelling the youth’s agitation, he said:“The Generation Z agitation is just in a stage of incubation. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan or extracting an apology from a fifteen-year-old girl or using batons and guns against the youths won’t work. One can never predict what the Generation Z agitation will look like when it matures…it might stun the entrenched power and knock it down as many other people’s movements have done in the past. Read the history of movements, you will understand.”Kishor’s victory in Bankipur is just the beginning of his political journey in Bihar. This writer would prefer to watch how this unfolds rather than rush to reach a conclusion. Nalin Verma is a journalist, author, folklorist and educator.