Dalit politics in Uttar Pradesh is at crossroads. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), whose leader Mayawati famously became the first woman Dalit Chief Minister of any State in 1995, now struggles to retain her sway, while the emerging Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad’s party Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) (ASP) lacks organisational heft to make a splash.

The November Assembly byelection, held in nine seats of the State, brought the Dalit dilemma to the fore: Neither party won a seat. Candidates of BSP and ASP could not even emerge as runners up in any seat.

Mayawati had taken a calculated risk in the byelection: BSP, which in the past used to skip byelections, fielded candidates in all nine seats. After it won none, Mayawati once again announced not to contest byelections in the future.

A look at the seat-wise results reveals that Azad’s party outperformed BSP. ASP came third in two constituencies, Meerapur and Kundarki in west Uttar Pradesh, and the BSP finished a distant fifth.

In five other seats—Phulpur, Karhal, Khair, Katehari, and Majhawan—BSP came in at third place, followed by ASP at fourth place. In Ghaziabad, BSP came third and ASP, fifth. (ASP contested on eight seats barring Sishamau, while BSP in all nine.) BJP, meanwhile, won a whopping six seats: Phulpur, Ghaziabad, Khair, Majhawan, Katehari, and Kundarki. Samajwadi Party bagged two seats, Karhal and Sishamau; NDA ally Rashtriya Lok Dal won Meerpur.

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Clearly, the division of Dalit votes is not helping either party. Though Azad has asserted that his party will contest all seats in the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, the Dalit discourse in the State—where Punjab-born Dalit leader Kanshi Ram had succeeded in creating an environment where a Dalit woman, Mayawati, could become Chief Minister for four terms—is now so feeble, it does not signal the victory of either Dalit party. Besides, Mayawati is now 68, and there is no clear alternative leadership in the party.

Even the combined votes of BSP and ASP were far too small to ensure a victory in any seat in this byelection and could well predict what will happen here in the 2027 election: this goes to show the malaise runs deep.

Mayawati, the colossal figure of Dalit leadership in Uttar Pradesh is now clearly marginalised, and Azad’s emergence is tepid. The silver lining is that the State now has several Dalit MPs including from non-reserved seats: but they are hardly serving the community’s cause.

Tanvir Aeijaz, honorary vice-chairman at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, who teaches politics and public policy at Delhi University, said, “Dalit politics in UP has certainly been waning since the 2000s, due to the decline and disintegration of the Dalit movement.” While in search of political power, be it even at the cost of Dalit ideology and identities, the BSP—the vanguard of Dalit politics in UP—has not only collapsed but also contributed to the resurgence and consolidation of BJP, he told Frontline.

“This is quite visible in the class/caste dispersion and scattering within the Dalit movement in the State. The implosion in the BSP has led to a significant chunk of sub-castes within the Dalit community shift to other parties, particularly to the BJP,” said Aeijaz.

Azad, an Ambedkarite, is working hard to arrest the fragmentation of Dalits and has therefore emerged as a force to reckon with, he added. “He is reaching out to a large section of Pasmanda Muslims too, despite the BJP’s polarising Hindutva politics.” Azad’s rise has been gradual ever since he formed the Bhim Army in 2015. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Azad won Uttar Pradesh’s Nagina seat (which has a 20 per cent Dalit population) securing over 51 per cent of votes. BSP, which had won the seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, with a massive margin against the BJP, lost its deposit and got just 1.3 per cent of the total votes cast.

Also Read | How the SP-Congress alliance in Uttar Pradesh became a sponge that soaked in people’s discontent against BJP and Modi

In Uttar Pradesh, BSP, which had secured 30.4 per cent of votes cast in the 2007 Assembly election, and formed the State government, saw its electoral fate dramatically shift in the 2022 Assembly election, when its vote share declined to 12.7 per cent. And the main beneficiary of BSP’s decline in Uttar Pradesh is BJP: The saffron party first managed to woo non-Jatav Dalits and then a substantial chunk of Jatavs, a Dalit subcaste to which Mayawati belongs.

Meanwhile, BSP’s performance has been dwindling in the country as a whole too. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BSP had contested 424 seats across the country including 79 in Uttar Pradesh, but could win none. The party’s vote percentage declined to 9.39 per cent in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, from 19.43 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when it had alliance with the Samajwadi Party. Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, with his “Pichde (backward classes), Dalit and Alpasankhyak (minorities)” pitch managed to breach BSP’s Dalit fortress, while the Congress also made gains in some constituencies such as Bharatpur, Rajasthan.

Journalist-author Ajoy Bose writes in his book Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati: “Mayawati’s social engineering project that swept her to power in 2007 did open the possibilities of a paradigm shift in Indian politics… However, Mayawati’s “sarvajan” social engineering experiment fell apart even before it could start properly. In retrospect, the alliance between the Dalits, sections of the lower OBCs, Muslims and upper castes that so dramatically swept her to power in 2007 arose not out of an evolved political strategy but from a temporary tactical arrangement facilitated by a motley group of upper castes led by Brahmins to get rid of the Yadav clan at all costs.”

The take-away from Bose’s analysis is that short-term power manoeuvres do not work in the long run; they could, on the contrary, be the death knell of the social transformation aspirations of Dalit parties.

The Congress has asked for a third seat from the Samajwadi Party for the bypolls in Uttar Pradesh as the party is unhappy with the two seats allocated to it, according to an India Today TV report.

Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had informally discussed the seat-sharing for upcoming bypolls during the swearing-in ceremony of Omar Abdullah as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar on October 16, the report said citing sources.

Currently, the Samajwadi Party has offered Ghaziabad and Khair seats to Congress. However, Congress is still claiming the Phulpur seat, where the Samajwadi Party has announced its own candidate, it added.

Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Congress in-charge Avinash Pandey, Party Chief Ajay Rai, and Party Leader Aradhana Mishra are negotiating with the Akhilesh Yadav-led party. However, the Samajwadi Party is not planning to give more seats, the report said.

The seat-sharing issue comes as Congress is under immense pressure from its allies to revise its poll strategy after the disappointing Haryana Assembly Election results and its failure to secure a seat in the Jammu region.

However, there are speculations that the Gandhi family discussed the Phulpur seat with Akhilesh Yadav, a seat where the Samajwadi Party has chosen Mustafa Siddiqui candidate, who had lost the previous election, the report stated.

The top leaders of Congress and Akhilesh Yadav will soon finalise the seat-sharing for UP bypolls, the report added citing sources from Congress.

The UP bypolls for nine seats will be conducted on November 13. The nine seats will include Karhal (Mainpuri), Meerapur (Muzaffarnagar), Katehari (Ambedkar Nagar), Ghaziabad, Sisamau (Kanpur), Majhawan (Mirzapur), Phulpur (Prayagraj), Khair (Aligarh), Kundarki (Moradabad).

The seats fell vacant after the MLAs were elected as MPs in Lok Sabha Elections 2024, while Samajwadi Partly MLA from Sisamau, Irfan Solanki, was disqualified on criminal charges.

The counting of votes is scheduled for November 20.

The Congress and Samajwadi Party had previously contested together as the INDIA bloc for Lok Sabha elections.