She and Jatav Dalits will almost certainly ensure the BSP gets a 10% vote share in Uttar Pradesh in the Lok Sabha elections.
There is so much buzz in India over the imminent consecration ceremony of Lord Ram at the new temple being constructed in Ayodhya that even significant political developments are not being debated furiously by pundits who breathe politics day in and out. The frenzy, excitement, debates, disputes and controversies surrounding the event at Ayodhya have virtually drowned out a major political development that came about soon after Mayawati celebrated her birthday on 15 January. Basically, she has handed over Uttar Pradesh on a platter to the BJP for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Perhaps when the celebrations of the consecration ceremony slowly fade away from media headlines will pundits realise the importance of this development.
The sheen, the aura of an Empress and the halo of a Dalit icon have visibly started peeling off. In 2022, even the most die-hard followers of the former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mayawati could see the writing on the wall when the Assembly election results came out. The Bahujan Samaj Party became a hollow shell, wining just one seat in a 403-member Assembly, down from 207 it won in 2007. There seems to be no possibility of a comeback.
Dalit and backward caste politics have moved on in a direction that Mayawati has failed to find. The 2024 Lok Sabha elections will probably be the last one in which analysts, rivals and supporters will consider the BSP as a contender for even a meaningful share of votes and seats, forget power. But in what could be her swansong in the Lok Sabha sweepstakes, Mayawati could end up giving a priceless parting gift to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Whether she is doing it deliberately, under coercion or unwittingly is an irrelevant point for debaters in television channels.
But by publicly announcing that her party will contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on its own without joining any alliance, Mayawati has effectively signed a death warrant for the I.N.D.I Alliance in Uttar Pradesh. Even though she is a pale shadow of the formidable leader that she once was, Mayawati still commands the devoted support of her core vote base. Look at it this way, in the 2017 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the BSP had won a shade more than 22% of the vote share. That dropped to 13% in 2022. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BSP had managed a vote share of just about 20% though it failed to win a single seat. For the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Mayawati forged what appeared to be a formidable alliance with Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party). The BSP vote share dipped marginally but it won 10 seats. This time around, the vote share of the BSP is expected to drop even below the 13% it managed in the 2022 Assembly elections. Let’s assume that a forlorn and forsaken Mayawati persuades just 10% of the electorate to vote for her lost cause in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
From here on, even a schoolgirl can do the maths and figure out how that will result in a virtual sweep for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, contrary to what most analysts and even pollsters indicated, the BJP juggernaut staved off the stiff challenge from the SP-BSP alliance, dropping from 71 seats in 2014 to 63 seats. The primary reason was the fact that the BJP vote share in the state was an astounding 49.6%. The eight seats that the BJP did lose compared to the 2014 elections were due to successful transfer of votes between the alliance partners, mostly from supporters of the SP to BSP. For instance, the popular Manoj Sinha was seeking a repeat mandate from Ghazipur, a seat he won in 2014 by about 32,500 votes; not a very big margin given the tidal wave in favour of Narendra Modi in 2014. To that extent, he was indeed vulnerable.
The alliance nominated Afzal Ansari, brother of the dreaded gangster Mukhtar Ansari as a BSP candidate. A successful transfer of SP votes led to Sinha losing the seat by about 120,000 votes in 2019. That scenario is unlikely to be repeated in 2024, no matter who the candidates are. There are some who suggest that anti-incumbency against the BJP could play a role in the 2024 elections and voters might just give it a jolt. Electoral data doesn’t suggest anything of that sort. The BJP vote share went up from about 42% in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to more than 49% in the 2019 elections. In the 2022 Assembly elections, the BJP dropped 57 seats compared to the 2017 Assembly elections. But its vote share went up by close to 2%. For a decade now, electoral data from every election suggests that the vote share of the BJP is consistently and considerably higher in Lok Sabha elections than in Assembly elections. Take the example of Delhi, though it holds good for all states.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP vote share was a staggering 58%. In the Assembly elections held after a few months, the BJP vote share dropped to about 35%.
In the event, there appears very little possibility of the BJP vote share dropping below what it had managed in the 2019 elections. In fact, there is a possibility that the BJP vote share in the state might cross 50% like it has in Himachal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Karnataka in 2019. Events since 2022 clearly suggest that both Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath remain immensely popular and charismatic leaders. In such a scenario, even suggesting strong anti-incumbency would appear to be a stretch. Sure, there could be individual candidates and seats where voters might be unhappy with the performance of the incumbents. One is not even talking about the tremendous emotional spill-over effect the consecration of the Lord Ram idol would have on voters. By refusing to participate in this historic event and dubbing it as a Modi show, major opposition parties have done no favours to themselves.
For argument’s sake; let us assume that the BJP vote share in 2024 drops a few points, to maybe 45%. This is where the priceless gift of Mayawati comes in. She and Jatav Dalits will almost certainly ensure the BSP gets a 10% vote share. A heroic effort at alliance building and tireless campaigning by Akhilesh Yadav had resulted in the SP-led alliance gaining 64 seats and increasing its vote share by more than 10% in the 2022 Assembly elections. But the harsh reality is that the combined alliance vote share was 32% or so. No one expects the vote share to go substantially above that number in 2024. So we have a scenario where the BJP (assuming a lower vote share) gets 45% of the votes and the principal rival gets 32% of the votes.
Don’t be surprised if the BJP tally goes up from 63 to 73 seats. In such a case, it can lose 10 seats in Bihar and Maharashtra, and still win 303 seats in 2024. In our next column, we will analyse how even the projections of big losses for the BJP in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bihar may not materialise.
Yashwant Deshmukh is Founder & Editor in Chief of CVoter Foundation and Sutanu Guru is Executive Director.