Amit Shah’s Bharatiya Janata Party is not embarrassed at the thought of caste politics. For all the emphasis on governance and development, it wouldn’t have been possible for the party to win 71 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh without making careful caste calculations. This doesn’t mean the party is engaged in unabashed casteism, although deliberate polarisation is among the various tools it utilised. Instead, the aspirational message of progress has always been grafted to a studious understanding of local identity politics in party president Shah’s larger game plan.

This is how, for example, a party that once would get only one out of every 10 Dalit votes two decades ago, managed to snag 24% of all Dalit votes in last year’s general elections, according to the National Election Study. And now Shah is bringing that same playbook to Delhi.

The first rally that the BJP held after the announcement of poll dates in Delhi happened to be the Maha Dalit Sammelan. It promulgated an ordinance that regularised more than 1,600 unauthorised colonies in Delhi, a move that disproportionately affects Dalits. It has promised electrification for the entire city, again a policy that would impact lower-caste colonies the most. On Monday, it inducted Congress Dalit leader and former union minister Krishna Tirath into the party.

The swing vote

Dalits account for one-fifth of all voters in the capital, a huge potential constituency. Traditionally, as was true across most of the country, Dalits voted for the Congress. A few years ago, the Bahujan Samaj Party began to make some headway in the capital, grabbing seats and vote share away from the Congress and party chief Mayawati made it clear she saw Delhi as a potential growth area for the Uttar Pradesh-based party with a large lower-caste base.

All those gains were, however, washed away by the arrival of the Aam Aadmi Party in 2013. The BSP ended up within a tiny vote-share, while the AAP took home 9 out of the 12 reserved seats in the Delhi assembly elections and became the party to beat when it came to Dalits in the capital. Since AAP’s main focus was the urban poor, a constituency that features an inordinate number of Dalits, it wasn’t hard for the nascent party to capture that section of the populace.


But things changed once again in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. The BJP, led by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, had run a carefully plotted campaign on development while also annexing community leaders who could leverage identity politics. By bringing on board leaders like Udit Raj, a renowned politician from a low-caste background and by allying with parties like the Lok Janshakti Party and Apna Dal, the BJP managed to establish its credentials with members of the lower castes.

That’s not to say the BJP only went by caste politics. The Modi wave also played a role, with the projection of a strong leader to replace the corrupt Congress leadership, while the communal polarisation aided by the extended Sangh parivar pitted Dalits against other minority, particularly in the aftermath of the Muzaffarnagar riots in September 2013. As a result, the BSP did not end up winning even one seat in UP.


The BJP was the chief gainer of this Dalit flight from the Congress and the BSP, even in Delhi, where Raj, its candidate in the one reserved Lok Sabha seat, won handily over the AAP candidate. Krishna Tirath, a former union minister from the Congress, came a distant third.

There were rumours that Tirath, a former Member of Parliament, would be asked to contest legislative assembly elections this time as part of the Congress’ effort to use national leaders in the local contest. Instead the former minister has now been inducted into the BJP, giving it an even better chance of tilting Dalit votes in Delhi away from the AAP and the Congress and making the BJP the clear front-runner in the capital.