In Uttar Pradesh, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati had decided to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections alone. BSP got 9.39 per cent votes but did not get even a single seat.
Some Congress leaders were trying till the last moment to bring BSP into the India alliance, but Mayawati says that contesting elections in the alliance causes loss to BSP. Although the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not win any seats in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 Lok Sabha, it received more votes than the BJP or its alliance needed to win 16 seats.
If the INDIA bloc had also won these seats, the NDA’s total number of seats would have dropped to 278 and the BJP’s to 226. Without the SP-BSP coalition, the BJP, which won 33 seats in Uttar Pradesh, could have been left with just 19 seats (excluding RLD and APNA DAL (S), which would have been shocking considering that the party had won 62 seats in the state in 2019.
Seats where the BSP secured a larger number of votes than the winning margin are scattered throughout the region, extending from Bijnor to Mirzapur. These 16 seats are Akbarpur, Aligarh, Amroha, Bansgaon, Bhadohi, Bijnor, Deoria, Farrukhabad, Fatepur Sikri, Hardoi, Meerut, Mirzapur, Misrikh, Phulpur, Shahjahanpur, and Unnao, where the BSP more votes than the victory margin.
The BJP won 14 of these seats, while its allies Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and Apna Dal (Soneylal) won two seats, Bijnor and Mirzapur. In Bijnor, BSP candidate Vijender Singh polled the highest 2,18,986 votes out of sixteen seats. RLD defeated the Samajwadi Party by 37,508 votes in Bijnor.
In Mirzapur, Anupriya Patel defeated SP candidate by 37,810 votes. BSP’s candidate Manish Kumar polled 1,44,446 votes. Out of 16 seats in Shahjahanpur, the BJP’s candidate, Arun Kumar Sagar, won by the highest margin of 55379, while BSP candidate Dod Ram Verma polled 91710 votes. Arun Kumar Sagar defeats Jyotsna Gond.
In Farrukhabad, BJP candidate Mukesh Rajput won the lowest margin of 2,678 seats. He defeats SP candidate Dr Naval Kishor Shakya. BSP’s candidate, Kranti Pandey, got 45390 votes. Whereas neither the TMC nor the SP have ever won a Lok Sabha seat in either state, the Samajwadi Party gave the Trinamool Congress the Bhadohi seat in exchange for a seat from the Congress in Madhya Pradesh.
Despite receiving about 4.2 lakh votes, the TMC candidate was defeated by the BJP candidate by a margin of 44,072. The BSP candidate received about 1.6 lakh votes, which could have contributed to Dr Vinod Kumar Bind, the BJP candidate, winning.
Though anecdotal data suggests that many in the party’s core constituency have gone to the INDIA coalition in the state this time, there is no certainty that the votes the BSP received would have shifted to the SPCongress alliance in its absence.
MAYAWATI’S VOTE BANK SLIPPING IN UP
It is believed that Mayawati’s vote bank is slowly slipping in Uttar Pradesh. In 2014, BSP got 19.77 per cent of the vote, and in 2019, it got 19.42 per cent. When we compare BSP vote percent from 2014 to 2024, it declined by 10.38 percent.
Mayawati’s support base, not only among BSP’s main Jatav voters but also among non- Jatav, has slipped in large numbers in 2024. Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) party candidate Chandrashekhar Azad’s victory in Nagina Lok sabha seat by 151473 votes is an example of this.
In 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party and BSP together won 15 Lok Sabha seats. BSP had won ten seats, while Samajwadi Party had won five seats. Bahujan Samaj Party could not win even a single seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Since then, his electoral strength has been continuously weakening.
In the 2017 UP assembly elections, BSP got only 19 seats out of 403. This was its worst performance since 1991, when it had won 12 seats. It had won 80 seats in the 2012 assembly elections. Bahujan Samaj Party won only one seat in the 2022 UP assembly elections. By then, the vote percentage of BSP had come down to 12.88 percent in the assembly elections.