A Decades-Long Project’s Landmark In 2024: BJP Set To Win Most Of Seats Reserved For SCs

One of the foundational pillars of Hindutva has been the mainstreaming of the Dalit community into the Indian political process.

For decades, this bhagiratha prayatnya (there is no other word for such an arduous task), undertaken initially by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), showed only rare results, since the bulk of the Dalit vote was with the Congress.

Allied with the Muslim vote, Dalits provided an electorally significant captive vote bank for the Congress, for decades.

While the Dalit community constitutes approximately 17 per cent of our population, and is fairly evenly distributed across the country (barring the North East), distinctly higher concentrations exist in the Indo-Gangetic plains.

It is this twin factor which gifted the Congress mandate after mandate, in state after state, in election after election, in the first four decades following independence.

Yet, as early as in 1967, in the Himachal Pradesh assembly elections, A Singh of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS), the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), registered a thumping victory in Mewa constituency, reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs).

He polled 61 per cent of the popular vote, and his margin of victory was more than what the distant Congress runner-up got: 27 per cent.

Fifteen years later, in 1982, the BJP narrowly missed out on winning the Himachal Pradesh assembly elections. In the process, though, they won eight of the 16 SC reserved seats in that provincial legislature.

Then, in the late 1980s, the Sangh’s strategy had to be reworked to incorporate the fresh dynamics of mandir-Mandal politics, and the advent of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) under Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.

Imagine the challenge: on the one hand, the unrelenting pulls of Congress-style vote bank politics, being compounded on the other, by the triumphalist push of numerous, new regional parties who realised that they could successfully replace the Congress, largely by replicating the Congress model through novel social coalitions.

But in this century, the efforts of the Sangh finally achieved critical mass. The Dalit vote started to move exponentially to the BJP with stunning electoral impact.

In 2009, the BJP won only 12 of the 84 SC reserved seats; its average vote share in these seats was a moderate 23 per cent. But in 2014, these figures shot up to 40 wins with 39 per cent vote share.

Much of this vote gain was from the Congress, whose average vote share plummeted from 30 per cent to 20 per cent.

The BJP won all 17 SC reserved seats in Uttar Pradesh, and swept in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (another 10 SC seats).

In 2019, the BJP went one better by winning more than half the SC reserved seats, this time drawing votes more from the provincial parties. Note how the average vote share of ‘Others’ declined by 6 per cent to 33 per cent, while the BJP’s went up to 46 per cent (with 46 wins of 84).

To get a real feel of just how majestically the efforts of the past century have paid off, look at a chart of the BJP’s victory margins (Y-axis) versus vote share (X-axis), in the SC seats, in the 2019 elections.

Note the number of seats where the BJP won with over 50 per cent of the popular vote, and a win margin of over 20 per cent.

The BJP’s consistent performance in SC reserved seats has created some remarkable metrics.

One, the BJP has 10 firewall seats which it has won consecutively in 2009, 2014, and 2019. In comparison, the Congress has only two — Mavelikara in Kerala, and Jalandhar in the Punjab; and they could lose both this summer.

The Shiv Sena, a BJP ally, can claim only one firewall seat: Shirdi, in Maharashtra. And the only other party which has one firewall seat is the Trinamool Congress — Mathurapur in West Bengal; and it could lose this seat to the BJP soon.

Two, the BJP has won 35 SC reserved seats back-to-back in 2014 and 2019. That is an overweening statistic since no other party comes anywhere close.

The Trinamool, for example, have only five such seats, the Biju Janata Dal have three, Jaganmohan Reddy has one in Andhra Pradesh, and K Chandrashekar Rao has one in Telangana. The rest are BJP allies.

Three, in 2019, the BJP’s victory margin was over 10 per cent in 30 seats, and over 20 per cent in 20 wins. The implication is that opponents will have to struggle, or pray for anti-incumbency (fairly unlikely), if outcomes are to reverse in their favour in 2024.

It is, therefore, entirely possible, that the BJP may improve its performance in the SC reserved seats by a fair bit, in the forthcoming general elections.

From a Dharmic perspective, this is exactly how things should be, since, the reality is that, beyond the rhetoric and the narratives, a Dalit is simply what he or she has always been — a Hindu and an Indian; and that truth is now finding greater expression in the electoral sphere.