Mayawati's Dalit-Muslim formula helped BJP win Azamgarh easily
LUCKNOW: While Samajwadi Party (SP) lost its bastions Rampur and Azamgarh to the BJP, the performance of the Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) stands out, indicating that party chief Mayawati succeeded in re-stitching the Dalit-Muslim formula. It made the BJP’s win easy, especially in Azamgarh, where BSP fielded Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali. However, the party did not field its candidate in Rampur, leaving it to be a straight BJP-SP fight.
An upbeat Mayawati on June 27 exhorted her cadre to maintain the fervour with which they worked in Azamgarh for 2024. In the bypolls, winner Dinesh Lal Yadav ‘Nirauhua’ of BJP got 3,12,768 votes while the runner up, SP’s Dharmendra Yadav, got 3,04,089 votes. Jamali got a considerable chunk of 2,66,210 votes. The margin of Nirhaua’s win indicates that Jamali garnered a major chunk of Muslim and Dalit votes, reducing Yadav’s tally.
Hence, while the defeat has put the SP under distress, the BSP is elated at the return of Muslim votes into its kitty. A few months ago, SP had wrested all 10 Assembly segments in Azamgarh, securing 4.35 lakh votes, followed by the BJP which got 3.30 lakh votes and BSP with 2.24 lakh votes. The Muslim consolidation in favour of SP had led to its victory on all seats, while the BSP had got only a small number of Muslim votes.
As per political experts, Mayawati’s Dalit-Muslim formula led to the rise in BSP’s vote share from 2.24 lakh to 2.66 lakh in the bypoll. However, the vote share of SP dwindled from 4.35 lakh in the Assembly polls to 3.04 lakh in the bypoll.
“The BSP put up an impressive show dealing a major dent to SP in Azamgarh as it had turned into a battle of local leader versus an outsider. Jamali has a good influence due to his accessibility, irrespective of the caste and religion. Also, the support extended by Rashtriya Ulam Council and AIMIM to Jamali made the fight more difficult for Dharmendra Yadav,” says Prof AK Mishra of the Political Science Department of Lucknow University.
In Rampur, the BSP didn’t field any candidate against SP’s Asim Raja and BJP candidate Ghanshyam Lodhi. The saffron party got a majority of Dalit votes, and Lodhi defeated the SP candidate by 42,192 votes.