Mayawati has attributed the alliance’s poor showing to the drifting away from the SP of Yadav votes. She has referred to SP strongholds of Budaun, Firozabad, and Kannauj, lost by members of SP President Akhilesh Yadav’s family. SP leaders too, concede that their candidates did trail in assembly segments dominated by Yadavas, but add this is not a trend that could be generalized to blame SP.

A comparison of the BSP’s vote share in 2014 and 2019 in 38 Lok Sabha constituencies it contested, however, reveals that the BSP candidates gained substantially in every seat except one (Fatehpur). This gain could not have been possible without the SP supporters backing Mayawati’s candidates. Field reports during the campaign in Fatehpur Sikri, on the other hand, would suggest that choice of the BSP candidates pulled the vote share down below the 2014 share as some opposition votes also rallied behind congress’s Raj Babbar.

Trends also show that the 2019 vote share of BSP candidates in 11 seats was more than the combined vote share of SP and BSP in these states in 2014. Seven of ten seats won by the BSP are from these seats. SP leaders claim that the BSP could not have won seats like Jaunpur, Ghazipur and Lal Ganj, near Prime Minister’s constituency, Varanasi, without SP’s Yadav supporters voting for BSP candidates.

Mayawati’s stated reason was carefully worded on two counts. First while blaming the dwindling of SP’s support base of the SP’s Yadav support base, she did not blame the Muslim support base of SP’s Muslim-Yadav (MY) coalition. Second she kept a window open for a future alliance and did not attack Akhilesh.

With the BSP having emerged a bigger gainer than the SP in the elections, this provides it an opportunity to bolster credentials among the state’s sizeable Muslim population as a more bankable party than SP. Her remarks also sought to project that Yadavas are not solidly behind the SP as Dalits are behind BSP. The suggestion that Yadavas are not a cohesive unit in challenging the BJP can potentially create a wedge in the SP’s MY bank, in favour of the BSP.

Mayawati, for her part, has been trying to make further inroads into Muslim base. She tried fielding the highest number of Muslim candidates in 2017 assembly elections, though it did not yield results.

Assembly elections in UP are due only in 2022, leaving both sides a long time to regroup. They would be hoping for anti-incumbency against the Yogi Adityanath government, but if the BJP appears to be strongly placed, the two parties may need to collaborate again. That explains why Mayawati has kept a window open by avoiding any remarks critical of Akhilesh.

Mayawati’s repeated reference to “base votes” underlines limitations of the alliance’s ambitions of upsetting the BJP in UP, which contributed 80 seats to the Lok Sabha. The fixation with that arithmetic was obvious from the call to the electorate during the Lok Sabha campaign as well. Ek bhi vote na ghatne paye, ek bhi vote ne batne paye (not a single vote should go waste, not a single vote should split) was the slogan the SP-BSP-RLD alliance used in trying to consolidate a Muslim-Dalit-jat combine.

The results are a testimony to the failure of this arithmetic against the chemistry of BJP. While the BJP increased its vote share from 42.63% (2014) to 49.56%, the BSP-SP-RLD combine slipped from 42.98% (2014) to 38.89%-- a difference of over 10 percentage points.

A comparison with anti-BJP realignment’s success in Bihar assembly polls in 2015 can offer pointers to what was missing in the UP alliance in 2019. While the RJD-JDU-Congress alliance (Mahagathbandhan) in Bihar in 2015, too, was based on arithmetic of votes against the BJP-led NDA, the mahagathbandhan additionally had chemistry in form of goodwill for Nitish Kumar as the chief ministerial candidate.

Bihar’s arithmetic-plus-chemistry formulation was reflected in the campaign. While RJD leader Lalu Prasad campaigned against the BJP on the issue of reservation arithmetic, Nitish campaigned on a governance platform, focusing on promises.

In contrast — Ek vote na ghatna paye, ek vote bhi no batna paye—chant of SP-BSP alliance appeared to be centered only on the arithmetic of “base vote”.

The 2019 election heralds the end of Mandal era in Indian politics—or at least in Uttar Pradesh. UP’s two big votaries of backward caste/ Dalit assertion, SP and BSP, have now lost three successive elections to the BJP. In neighbouring Bihar, the BJP is still allied to two socialist parties JD(U) and LJP. But even here Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal among weaker sections can potentially transcend identity politics. In characteristic Mayawati fashion, she surprised Akhilesh with her plan to field BSP candidates in the forthcoming by polls forcing the latter to also reciprocate in kind. (IPA Service)