The Uttar Pradesh elections have been a bonanza for the Bharatiya Janata Party, gaining for it its biggest win in the state ever. Trends on Saturday afternoon point to the party winning a comfortable two-thirds majority in the Assembly. The mirror image to the BJP in this election is the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has crashed to an embarrassing defeat. Trends at 2pm on Saturday indicate that it will win less than 5% of seats in the Assembly. For a party that ruled a full term from 2007 to 2012, it might end up getting less than 20 seats.

The picture gets a bit better for the Bahujan Samaj Party if one looks at vote share. While it looks set to win less than 5% of the seats in the Assembly, it has managed to receive more than 20% of the votes cast in the elections. As of 2pm on Saturday, the Election Commission website allocated 22% of the votes to the BSP – tied with the Samajwadi Party. Yet, trends at 2pm indicate that the Samajwadi Party will get more than 50 seats.

The Samajwadi Party managed to squeeze out 3 times the number of seats as the BSP even as both parties have polled approximately the same number of votes.

Fundamental fault

This mismatch between seats and vote share points to a fundamental problem facing the Bahujan Samaj Party and its brand of Ambedkarite politics. While the party does well at maintaining its core vote share, pushed by the ideological commitment of many Dalits towards Ambedkarism, this same ideological zeal also prevents other castes and Muslim from joining up with it. So while the Bahujan Samaj Party is great at preserving its flock, it is floundering significantly in finding allies.

The 2017 vote share of the BSP matches its performance in 1996. Two decades of the BSP's efforts to add other castes on top of its Jatav core seem to have been wiped out.

This challenge in reaching out to new voters undermined Mayawati’s gambit of a Dalit-Muslim alliance in this election. As a strictly Dalit party, with members of the Jatav group at its core, the lack of a middle Muslim leadership in the Bahujan Samaj Party was a major handicap in attracting members of the minority community. Moreover, the party’s marketing tactic of jumbo rallies – key to building up a core Dalit vote base – mostly drew a blank with new voters such as Muslims. Mayawati was also unable to latch on to modern forms of publicity such as television or social media.

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Dalits and the BJP

An even more troubling trend for the Bahujan Samaj Party might be the positive perception many Dalits have of the BJP and Narendra Modi in particular. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, many non-Jatav Dalits voted for the BJP, drawn in by its promise of development and the towering presence of Modi. The Bahujan Samaj Party’s previous successes have hung on its attracting non-Jatav Dalits even as Jatavs – who constitutue 11.8% of the population of Uttar Pradesh – dominate the party. The crumbling of this coalition would mean an end to the party’s political fortunes, given that Jatavs by themselves will be unable to give the Bahujan Samaj Party enough seats to be a contender for power in India’s first-past-the-post system.

In this, Mayawati’s sensationalist and desperate allegation of the electronic voter machines being tampered in favour of the BJP maybe says less about the EVMs themselves and more about the bleak future prospects of the Bahujan Samaj Party itself. Mayawati thinks herself so out of the game that she would rather allege a fixed match than prepare for the next election.