Having failed to win even a single seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has been dealt a severe blow to its reputation of representing the voice of Dalits in the state.
In the 2019 polls, the BSP had worked out an alliance with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, the two won 10 seats.
This time round, the BSP chief faced an uphill task as she not only announced to go solo in the 2024 polls, but also some of her MPs either drifted away or showed signs of it. Besides, the political opponents also branded Mayawati’s party as the ‘B’ team of the saffron party based on the public stand taken by her on various issues. In the recent Rajya Sabha elections, her lone MLA Uma Shankar Singh had voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The fact that she fielded candidates on caste-sensitive seats brought in charges of her party acting as a vote ‘katuwa’ for INDIA bloc candidates.
On at least half a dozen seats, Muslim candidates fielded by the BSP got more votes then the victory margin of the BJP candidates, defeating INDIA bloc candidates. In Aonla, BSP candidate Abid Ali got about 90,000 votes while the victory margin was under 5,000 votes. Similarly in Amroha, Congress candidate lost by less than 3,000 votes as BSP candidate Mujahid Hussain garnered about 1.15 lakh votes.
In Budaun, Samajwadi Party candidate Aditya Yadav was struggling to win the seat with BSP candidate Muslim Khan getting over 60,000 votes. Yadav finally won. In Ambedkar Nagar also, though BJP lost to SP, BSP candidate Qamar Hayat got over 1.7 lakh votes.
Another big factor which went against the BSP was the removal of Akash Anand as coordinator midway and restrictions on directly attacking the NDA government.
Earlier this month, the SP had announced Afzal Ansari, BSP MP from Ghazipur, as its candidate from the seat for the Lok Sabha polls.
Danish Ali, BSP MP from Amroha, was suspended last year by Mayawati for speaking in favour of Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra.
Having now been wiped out from the crucial state, it remains to be seen how the BSP supremo starts afresh on a clean slate.
