The staggering victory margin of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections makes it difficult to imagine whet...
The staggering victory margin of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections makes it difficult to imagine whether the results would have been any different had the opposition parties played it another way. The BJP, after all, won more than three-fourths of the 403 seats in the assembly.
Yet, a constituency-level analysis shows that a two-way split of anti-BJP votes made the outcome even more lopsided. Consider this: there are 140 constituencies in the state where Muslims account for over 20% of the population. These seats were at the heart of the Samajwadi Party’s success in 2012 when it came to power dislodging the Bahujan Samaj Party – they had won more than half of them. In 2017, the BJP and its allies won a whopping 111 of them, thanks to a very palpable division of Muslim votes between the two regional parties, in addition to a Hindu consolidation.
The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party came together for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in a seeming effort to remedy the situation, but the alliance tanked spectacularly.Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity apart, analysts blamed the defeat on the coalition’s failure to rise above its inherent social contradictions.
