Why Mayawati is a sought after ally
STRATEGY BSP alliance at national level could be decisive in 2019
NEWDELHI: After Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) broke ranks from the 2015 grand alliance of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress in Bihar, hopes of a broad-based alliance to take on the Bharatiya Janata party suffered a huge setback. These hopes got a fresh momentum after an alliance of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) defeated the BJP in by-polls for the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats. The grand coalition narrative got a further boost when the Congress, Janata Dal (Secular) and the BSP came together to form the Karnataka government. The JD(S) and the BSP had fought the Karnataka elections in a pre-poll alliance. This experiment triggered speculations of the Congress and the BSP coming together in the forthcoming assembly elections in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. This author had pointed out in an earlier piece that a pre-poll alliance between the Congress and the BSP was ahead of the BJP in terms of vote share in six out of nine assembly elections held in these three states since 2003.
Ironical as it may sound, it is the BSP today which has once again created uncertainty around hopes of a grand collation against the BJP. Earlier this week Mayawati announced that the BSP was prepared to fight the elections on its own if it were not given a “respectable” number of seats. On 20 September, the BSP announced a pre-poll alliance with Ajit Jogi’s party in Chhattisgarh and also announced 22 candidates in Madhya Pradesh.
What explains this behaviour by the BSP? The party paid dearly by contesting alone in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP).
It did not win even one Lok Sabha seat in 2104 and had the lowest seat share to vote share ratio – a useful indicator of a party’s ability to convert popular support into seats in the firstpast-the-post system – in the UP assembly since 1989.