And, going by the present scenario where all major parties are running after ‘Dalits’ and leaving no stone unturned to woo them ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, political analysts say it’s the letter ‘D’ that will rule the roost.
The race to woo Dalits began in the month of June. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was perhaps the first to launch its Dalit outreach programme in the state and the party’s West UP president issued strict directives to all activists and leaders to focus on Dalits. BJP’s outreach was aimed to create a vote base in the seats that the party lost to BSP-SP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. In 2019, BJP lost seven prime seats, including Bijnor, Rampur, Nagina, Saharanpur, Sambhal, Amroha and Moradabad, in West UP. And this was when BJP managed to win all 14 Lok Sabha Seats in West UP in 2014.
This was not all.
Wooing Dalit voters also remained the main agenda in the recent tripartite meeting between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP and the UP government where the entire focus was on expansion of the party’s base among the Dalit-dominated pockets and its reach among non-Hindus.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, during the three-day meeting, sent a clear message to the functionaries and party workers to leave no stone unturned to woo Dalit voters and check their dwindling numbers when it comes to the BJP’s vote bank. “In the meeting, party people were told not to discriminate between Hindu and non-Hindu voters, including Dalits. Instead, accept the invites of Muslims and non-Hindus and connect with all,” a party worker said.
The Samajwadi Party (SP) joined the race soon after and launched a series of programmes and drives in order to woo the Dalit and OBC voters.
After winning the recent Ghosi by-election in UP’s Mau district, SP announced its fresh tagline —‘Abki baar PDA (Picchda, Dalit and Alpasankhyak) Sarkar’. In April, during his visit to Raebareli, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav unveiled the statue of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder and senior Dalit leader Kanshi Ram.
Responding to Yadav’s move, Mayawati had said: “The SP is trying to manipulate Dalit voters in the name of Kanshi Ram, which is the new agenda of the party. But SP’s long history of its caste-driven hatred and malice towards Dalits is known to all.”
Congress, too, is not behind when it comes to making an attempt to woo Dalits. The party launched the ‘Dalit Gaurav Samvad’, with UPCC president Ajay Rai saying: “Congress is leaving no stone unturned in wooing people from different sections of the society. And ‘Dalit Gaurav Samwad’ is a part of the similar drive that aimed to woo Dalits.”
Party activists said since Congress had not been in power in UP since 1989, it is making all possible efforts to regain lost ground.
However, the key question is — why do all parties want to woo Dalit voters? The answer lies with UP’s political analysts who said over the years, the traditional Dalit voters have moved away from BSP and hence, all political parties are making efforts to eat into the vote bank of Mayawati’s party.
“Majorly Dalits and up to some extent OBCs are set to take centrestage in UP politics in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. In UP, Dalits account for around 20 per cent of the population. In the past, when BSP used to be in all its glory, Dalits were their traditional voters. However, over the years, BSP’s performance dipped drastically. In 2007, the party won 206 seats and formed the government. In 2012 state assembly elections, the seats that the party won were reduced to 80. In 2014 Lok Sabha polls, BSP failed to win any of the seats. In 2017 state assembly polls, the party won 19 seats and recorded 22.2 per cent vote share. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BSP partnered with SP to form an anti-BJP ‘Mahagathbandhan’ (Grand Alliance) along with Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). However, the alliance failed to leave a mark and secured just 15 seats, while BJP won 62 of the 80 seats.
“Of this, BSP’s vote share was 19.43 per cent whereas SP and RLD’s vote share was 18.11 per cent and 1.69 per cent respectively. Meanwhile, in the 2022 state assembly polls, the total number of seats that the party won further reduced to one whereas the voting share reduced to 12.88 per cent,” pointed out Shashikant Pandey, head of the political science department, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University.
Pandey said in such a situation, BSP’s core voters have the ability to change the game when combined with OBCs. This theory got a shot in the arm after the Dalit vote in Ghosi bypolls gravitated towards SP, resulting in a spectacular win.
Pandey said it is for the same reason that all parties are wooing Dalits to fix their caste matrix ahead of the battle for 2024.