Okay, we all know the social chemistry of the BSP’s victory. We know that the BSP is a dalit party, that this time it stitched together an alliance with brahmins and some Muslims and thus bypassed the OBCs. Thus the BSP’s extraordinary success is all about caste arithmetic. Or so we think.

Here are four reasons why we need to revise this formulation. First, the BSP has never been just a dalit party, just as the BJP has never been just an upper caste party. The BSP has always drawn more than one-third of its votes from non-dalits. These ‘plus votes’ have always been critical to the BSP’s electoral success. The difference this time was that the proportion of non-dalit votes went up from about two-fifth to nearly half of the BSP’s votes.

Second, it was not just the brahmins but all of what Mayawati called the “upper caste samaj”. The BSP vote share among various upper castes was not very different: 17 per cent among brahmins, 12 per cent among rajputs, 14 per cent among vaishyas and 16 per cent among other upper castes. This was a three-fold increase over the BSP’s vote share in this segment in the last election. Yet let us not forget that, in all, upper castes comprised only about one-tenth of the BSP’s voters.

Third, the bulk of the BSP’s non-dalit votes came not from the upper castes but from the lower OBCs. If you exclude the dominant peasant communities like the yadavs, kurmis and lodhs, the BSP was the first preference of the rest of the OBCs. The BSP got on an average more than 30 per cent of the votes in this group. The non-dominant OBCs contributed about one-fifth to the total votes of the BSP, twice as much as the upper castes. The BSP also got about 17 per cent votes among the Muslims, a little more than it did among all the upper castes.

... contd.