What BJP has learnt from its Bihar mistake: Stay away from Yadavs

One of the key strategies of the BJP in the 2015 Bihar Assembly elections was to target Lalu Prasad Yadav's core constituency — the Yadav vote bank.

The Yadav community had been supporting the RJD strongman in Bihar for several elections and yet the saffron party opted to sweep them off their feet.

There was a reason behind that. During the 2014 Lok Sabha election, according to CSDS post-poll data, almost 19 per cent of Bihar’s Yadavs had voted for the BJP.

It had given the BJP a hope that the party would be able to dent Lalu's clout. The  results, however, shattered its expectations as the Yadavs convincingly backed the RJD-JDU combine.

Learning from its Bihar mistake, the BJP in 2017 is almost reluctant to reach out to the core vote bank of the Samajwadi Party — the Yadavs.

In Bihar, the party had fielded 22 Yadav candidates in the 160 seats that it had fought. In Uttar Pradesh, the number is 11 out of the 370 seats for which it has declared candidates.

The party has fielded nearly 148 candidates from other OBC communities who are not Yadavs.

Of the OBC communities, the BJP has focused on Kurmis (who got 31 seats), Koeris (25 seats) and Lodhs (20 seats) so far. Non-Yadav OBC communities have been largely known for favouring Yadav candidates, but in the previous Lok Sabha elections many of them had voted for the BJP.

Similarly, the BJP seems averse to touch Mayawati's core Jatav vote base. They are instead targeting the non-Jatav Dalits.

The Jatavs constitute about 55 per cent of the Dalit population in the state, but the BJP is fielding Jatav candidates in just 21 seats out of the 85 reserved constituencies. It has given 49 seats to other Dalit communities such as Paswan, Dhobi, Kori, Balmiki and Khatik.

The BJP in Uttar Pradesh clearly seems to be staying away from the Yadav and the Jatav vote bases of their rivals.

Instead, the party is focusing on the non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in addition to its traditional support base of the upper castes (it has been given 64 seats to Thakurs and 63 to Brahmins).

The BJP is hoping this strategy will help it overcome the lack of a chief ministerial candidate and a resurgent Akhilesh Yadav.

Only time will tell if this social engineering will work in favour of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh or the party would end up with a Bihar-like poll outcome (when Nitish Kumar, along with Lalu Yadav, ended the BJP's 2014 winning streak in Bihar).

Will a resurgent Akhilesh, along with Rahul Gandhi, dash the saffron party's hopes in the high-stakes Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections?

This is one election that psephologists will closely watch to make sense of the caste allegiance of the Indian voter.

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