After its stellar performance in the 2007 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, when it formed the government on its own, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was seen as a ray of hope for Dalit politics on the national stage and it was also speculated that party president Mayawati would one day become the prime minister. The party, which has been performing poorly since 2012, managed to win only one seat in the 403-member assembly on Thursday.
The party has not only been reduced to one seat in the 403-seat state assembly, but has a vote share of 12.8%. The party contested all the 403 seats. Notably, in 1993, when the party began its political innings, it won 67 out of 164 seats and had a vote share of 11.2%.
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Even in the worst case scenario, the party has never got less than 19% of the votes in the state. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, when not a single party candidate could win in the state, the BSP’s vote share was 19.77 per cent. In the 2017 assembly elections, when it won just 19 seats, its vote share stood at 22.23%. It remained in the region when it formed an alliance with the SP and won 10 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
Interestingly, in the current assembly election results it is difficult to miss the fact that the party’s vote share is close to the share of Jatav votes in UP. Dalits account for 21% of the total votes in UP and the Jatavs (Mayawati’s Dalit sub-caste) alone account for 13% of the votes.
Sanjay Kumar of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) says that one should not conclude that just because voteshares match, only Jatavs have voted for the BSP. However, he says it is clear that other castes and sub-castes have left the party.
“We used to think that 2014 was the worst when he could not win even a single seat. But now we see that a new worst is being built. It is now confined to the party of Jatavs only. It has failed to retain the support of non-Jatav Dalits, who were part of their support base. There is no point in discussing any other caste group when the party has got only more than 12% votes,” Kumar said.
Most importantly, according to Kumar, this may be the first election when Muslims—a key component of the Bahujan political thought propounded by BSP founder Kanshi Ram—have completely abandoned Mayawati.
“BSP was never the first choice of minorities. But the party has always got 20-23% Muslim votes. In these elections, however, Muslim support for the BSP is less than that. BJP received from the society. As per the survey estimates, BSP is getting 3-4% Muslim votes, while BJP is attracting 7-8% of the community votes. Since it was a bipolar contest and Muslims did not see Mayawati as a challenger, they did not want to waste their vote,” Kumar said.
While a BSP spokesperson declined to comment on the election defeat, a party leader said, “We remain on our core support base. Some votes have gone away from us because of the polarized environment. Perhaps, we could not campaign well enough to convince the voters that we are a credible challenger to the BJP.”
While the BSP was never big on rallies and road shows, relying more on door-to-door campaigning and community meetings for campaigning, Mayawati’s visibility in these elections was unusually low. While Yogi Adityanath held 203 rallies and road shows before the elections, Priyanka Gandhi 209 and Akhilesh Yadav over 130, Mayawati held just 18 rallies.