Sirsa, Haryana: Five months after an impressive show in the Lok Sabha polls in Haryana, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) appears to have lost political momentum in the run-up to the state’s assembly elections due on 13 October.
This could augur well for the incumbent Congress, which feared that a rejuvenated BSP could play spoiler in a multi-cornered contest by weaning away the crucial Dalit vote bank.
Loyalty issue: The BSP election office in Hansi, Haryana. After the Congress’ win in the Lok Sabha polls, some politicians and voters have drifted away from the BSP in Haryana in keeping with local priorities. Rajkumar / Mint
The BSP accounted for 15.74% votes polled—the third largest—in the state in the general election in May, while former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala-led Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), which is expected to be the Congress’ toughest competitor in the assembly elections, was only marginally ahead with 15.77% of the vote share. The Congress had a 41.77% share.
BSP’s vote share in the Lok Sabha was a marked improvement over the last Haryana assembly polls in 2005, where it won just one seat and polled 3.44% of the votes, while the Congress swept the polls winning 67 seats with 42.46% of the votes.
So far, Mayawati, the BSP’s public face, has stayed away from the campaign in Haryana even though she has pressed into service six of her ministers from Uttar Pradesh for electioneering in Haryana. In the districts of central and western Haryana such as Hissar and Sirsa, among the areas that the party did well in the Lok Sabha poll, BSP’s ground-level campaigning has been low key to the point of being invisible in some places.
“The voters of BSP have a very typical nature (of) being silent and to remain unnoticed. The vote share of BSP remains intact irrespective of the issues in the electioneering,” writer and columnist Badri Narayan said, pointing to the dangers of reaching hasty conclusions about the BSP.
While this may be the case, it is apparent that it is not smooth sailing for the BSP.
The curious case of the BSP’s Lok Sabha candidate from Hissar, Ram Dayal Goyal, who received 90,277 votes compared with the winner Bhajan Lal’s (of Haryana Janhit Congress, or HJC) 248,476 votes showcases the party’s problems. According to Goyal, he resigned from BSP about a month and a half ago. Goyal told Mint that he has begun to help the Congress’ assembly election campaign.
However, BSP’s Haryana chief, Prakash Bharti told Mint that as far as he was concerned, Goyal continued to be a part of BSP.
According to politicians from other parties and analysts, support for the BSP among voters and politicians peaked during the last Lok Sabha election as there was widespread belief that the party’s leader and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati had a realistic chance of becoming prime minister.