The electoral battle for Uttar Pradesh this time was all about the ‘plus vote’. Each of the major players had their base vote, crucial for staying in the race. But each party realised that the base vote was not enough to win elections.

Thus the three big players in the election were looking for a plus vote, something to supplement their base vote and go past the rest. This is what accounts for Rajpur and Vaishya Sammelans by SP, the Sarvajan Samaj strategy of the BSP and the return of Kalyan Singh to BJP and its alliance with the Apna Dal. The story of the just-concluded election is the story of the relative success and failures of these strategies. The Indian Express-CNN-IBN-CSDS post-poll survey provides a wealth of evidence to show how these strategies fared in the election. Here is an analysis of the fate of the political strategies followed by the four leading parties based on interviews conducted in the post-poll survey for the first six phases of polling.

BSP

No matter how many seats it wins eventually, no one doubts that this time the hawa was with the BSP. Mayawati knew that her Dalit voter was not very sensitive to what she did to court non-Dalit voters. That left her free to aggressively pursue her search for plus votes. While she strategically focused her and the media’s attention on the Brahmins, she quietly worked on other groups as well. She knew that the very possibility of behenji coming to power was enough to galvanise her Dalit votes. Our evidence suggests that she succeeded to some extent in both these objectives, but in surprising ways. BSP’s principal non-Dalit vote came not from the Brahmins or other upper castes, but from OBCs and, to a lesser extent, from Muslims. The hawa in her favour helped her to consolidate Jatav as well as non-Jatav votes. The BSP’s success in improving its vote share across the caste divide was not simply a case of clever caste manoeuvres. Mayawati’s image as an effective administrator contributed. Her popularity, however, did not cross all caste barriers and did not pull many women voters to her party. Or else the BSP could have secured a majority on its own.

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