Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 80

Indian Politics & Policy
el parties with a stronger base among
OBCs. Bihar and UP present themselves
as a fit case for this purpose.
As is evident in Figure 1, the BJP
in UP had a considerable base of support
among OBCs, with little edge over
the SP in the early 1990s. Recall that
the early 1990s were the period where
the movement for Ram Mandir at Ayodhya
(in UP) reached its peak and the
BJP was at the forefront of it. Thereafter,
the party’s support base among
OBCs began to decline and continued
till 2009, by which point its vote share
among OBCs had plummeted to 14
percent. But in the 2014 LS election, the
BJP’s vote share shot up to 42 percent,
far greater than what it used to be at the
height of Ram Mandir movement. Its
spectacular performance among OBCs
was, however, not a one-off incident,
as the party sustained the momentum
in the 2019 LS election to corner about
half the total OBC votes, a feat never
achieved (at least in LS elections) even
by the SP (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Vote Share of BJP and SP among OBCs (UP)
Note: Figures are weighed by actual vote share of BJP in the respective state and
rounded off at the cut-off point 0.5
Source: NES, respective years
The BJP’s increasing gains have
meant a substantial loss for SP as the
latter, relative to other parties, enjoyed a
large base of support among OBCs. Although
the SP had begun to lose part of
its OBC votes after 1999, it continued to
receive more OBC votes than any other
party until 2009. This helped the party
in large measure maintain its lead over
other parties in terms of both overall
vote and seat share in the state. But the
LS election held in 2014 marked an end
to SP’s relative advantage among OBCs.
In many ways, the 2014 LS election was
a reversal of the 1999 LS election. In
terms of vote share among OBCs, the
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