Null and void: The fall and fall of Mayawati’s BSP

In Uttar Pradesh, where it had won 10 seats in the last Lok Sabha elections in alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), the party was trailing at third or fourth position on most of the seats.

At 6 pm, the BSP’s vote share nationally stood at roughly 2 per cent, almost half of its 2019 share.

In UP, the BSP’s vote share dropped to 9.38 per cent – a drop of over 3 percentage points as compared to its 2022 Assembly elections vote share of 12.88 per cent. The party had won only one Assembly seat.

This is the second time in the past three decades when the BSP has not won a single seat in a Lok Sabha election. In 2014, too, the party could not win a seat. The BSP had won 21 seats in 2009, 19 seats in 2004, 14 seats in 1999, five seats in 1998 and 11 seats in 1996.

Fails to get Muslim votes, again

This is also the second time that the BSP’s bid to engineer a vote bank equation of Muslims and Dalits has failed. In the 2022 UP Assembly elections, the BSP had fielded a maximum number of Muslim candidates, but not a single one of them managed to win. The party ended up winning a single Assembly seat that year.

In this Lok Sabha election, the BSP once again fielded the most number of Muslim candidates in UP — 35 — in a bid to broaden her support base by combining Dalits and Muslim votes. While Muslims constitute about 20 per cent of the population in the state, Dalits form 21 per cent.

This, however, led the Opposition alliance of the Samajwadi Party and Congress to accuse the BSP of being the “B-team” of the ruling BJP as they apprehended that by fielding Muslim candidates, Mayawati would make a dent in the INDIA bloc’s vote share, thereby benefitting the BJP.

But the trends suggested that the party again failed to garner Muslim votes, and a section of Dalit votes seems to have also drifted away from the BSP. Almost all the Muslim BSP candidates came third in their respective constituencies.

Campaign pitch and setback

In the last two months, BSP chief Mayawati addressed over 40 rallies across the country, including around 30 rallies in UP. She also engaged her nephew Akash Anand, who she had declared as her successor in the party, for campaigning and allowed him to interact with the media. But the party’s campaign received a setback last month when Mayawati removed Akash from the position of party national coordinator and her political successor, days after he was booked for “promoting enmity” in his speech in Sitapur. Akash, who had been attacking the BJP in his rallies, curtailed his plans of campaigning and is currently remaining politically inactive.

The challenge ahead

The BSP’s poor performance in this Lok Sabha election is a major setback for the party ahead of the 2027 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh. With the SP set to win over three dozen Lok Sabha seats, it has emerged as the sole political force in the state which can challenge the BJP. Any attempt by the BSP to win the support of anti-BJP votes from Muslims, Dalits, and OBCs will therefore be quite a challenging task.