The collapse of a party: Days to go for Lok Sabha polls, where are Mayawati, BSP?

When the BSP was reduced to 1 seat in an Assembly of 403 in the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections, it was thought that the party could not possibly fall lower.

It just might.

With the Lok Sabha elections set to be announced any day now, the Mayawati-led party is floundering, with no directions from the top, its sitting MPs either already out or looking to exit, its leaders baffled at the BSP’s no-alliance stand, and its leadership giving mixed messaging regarding the BJP.

As the other parties in UP work out tie-ups, and go about consolidating caste votes, including the BSP’s core base of Dalits, Mayawati remains more inaccessible than ever.

The seeming disinterest towards the general elections is particularly striking as in 2019, the BSP had won the second-highest number of seats in UP, at 10 out of 80, even if this was way behind the BJP’s 62. That result incidentally had come on the back of a “historic alliance” between the BSP and SP, with the SP winning 5 seats.

Between the 2019 general elections, when it got around 22% of the vote share (contesting 38 seats in its alliance with the SP), to the 2022 Assembly polls, the BSP vote share saw a huge 10% fall. At 12.8% of the votes, while contesting all the 403 seats, the BSP got just a little more than the votes it had got in its very first election after its formation, in 1993.

Between 1993 and 2022, the BSP had never got less than 19% of the votes in UP. In the 2007 Assembly elections, when it swept to power with a three-fourth majority, stringing together a broad coalition of Dalits and upper castes, it had got 30.7% of the votes.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when the BSP did not win a single seat in UP, it still had a vote share of 19.77%. In the 2017 Assembly polls, when it won