With Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah launching the party’s Bihar Assembly campaign on Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary on Tuesday, the scramble for the Dalit vote is clearly on. But while the vote has moved decisively away from the parties backed by them earlier, who it will go to is yet unclear.
The 2014 Lok Sabha elections saw the BJP’s vote share among Dalits double to 24 per cent, a post-poll survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) found, while the vote share of the Congress and the BSP fell below 20 per cent among Dalits. Using constituency-level data compiled by Datanet India, The Hindu found that the Congress won 53 seats in Scheduled Caste-dominated areas in 2009 and retained only 13 of them, while the BSP which held 13, lost all. The BJP, on the other hand, went from 21 to 73 of those seats.
It was the first time that the Congress trailed among Dalit voters. This was also the BSP’s worst showing. However, whether the Dalit vote will remain with the BJP or move to other parties is unclear based on recent Assembly elections, political scientists say. In those elections, the Dalit vote seemed to be up for grabs.
In Delhi, the AAP won 68 per cent of the Dalit vote, nearly double the vote share of the community it had got in the previous Assembly election just 14 months earlier, the CSDS found. The BJP’s vote share among Dalits in Delhi fell slightly between the two elections, and crashed precipitously for the Congress, going from 23 per cent to just six per cent in February.
There is a fragmentation in the Dalit vote, said Rahul Verma, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the issue. “The decline of the BSP and weakening of the Congress has opened up space for the BJP nationally and regional players in their respective states [AAP in Delhi and Punjab, Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and the Biju Janata Dal in Orissa] to woo Dalit voters,” Mr. Verma said.
Dalit voters are not homogenous, and differences among Scheduled Castes, in both class and caste terms, will affect where the vote goes. “The middle class among Dalits [urban, educated, with stable income], though small in size, is moving away from the Congress and the BSP. In the 2014 elections, they were more likely to vote for the BJP in comparison to poor Dalits,” Mr. Verma said.
