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Journalism of Courage
The Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which attempted to woo back its core Jatav Dalit voter base in the Capital by contesting 68 of Delhi’s 70 seats, not only drew a blank but polled only 0.58% of the votes — fewer than it garnered in 2020 and lesser than the vote share of debutant AIMIM (0.77%), which contested only two seats.
The BSP also came close to being beaten by NOTA, which polled 0.57% of the votes.
On Sunday, Mayawati chose to blame the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for its debacle. “The BSP and other parties suffered as the results of the Delhi polls were one-sided in favour of the BJP, which ended its 27-year wait to assume power. One major reason for this is the AAP’s tenure in the Capital,” Mayawati said in a statement, while urging her supporters not to get disappointed.
In terms of absolute numbers, the BSP polled 55,066 votes, or an average of 809 votes per seat. Its best performance came in Vikaspuri, where its candidate secured 2,642 votes, while in Gokalpur, a Scheduled Caste-reserved seat, the BSP candidate garnered 2,562 votes.
The only silver lining for the BSP was that in 10 seats – Vikaspuri, Sangam Vihar, Kirari, Chhatarpur, Rohtas Nagar and Laxmi Nagar, apart from the reserved seats of Seemapuri, Kondli, Ambedkar Nagar and Patel Nagar – its vote share was more than that of the Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshiram). In three seats, Rajinder Nagar and the SC-reserved Trilokpuri and Gokalpur, the Aazad Samaj Party finished ahead of the BSP.
The party led by Nagina MP Chandrashekhar Azad has emerged as a strong rival of the BSP for Dalit votes. And it was to stem the shifting of the youth vote towards Azad that Mayawati had tasked her nephew and the party’s national coordinator Akash Anand to handle the party’s campaign in the Capital. The BSP fielded over 45 Dalit candidates across the 68 seats, 33 above the 12 reserved constituencies. Of the 45, 35 were from the Jatav community. “Most of our candidates were youth from the Jatav community, but we did not get the desired results,” a BSP leader in Delhi said.
Since the AAP burst on the scene in 2013, the Dalit community has been behind the Arvind Kejriwal-led outfit. The community’s backing is seen to have played a significant role in the AAP’s landslide victories in the 2015 and 2020 Assembly polls, and accounted for a big part of its performance this time.
The BSP’s vote share has been shrinking not just in Delhi but other states as well since it was voted out of power in Uttar Pradesh in 2012. Its best performance in Delhi was in 2008, when the party had won Badarpur and the SC-reserved seat of Gokalpur, with a 14% vote share.
