Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 86

Indian Politics & Policy
(SBSP), formed by Sone Lal Patel and
Om Prakash Rajbhar, respectively.
V. Implications for
Social Justice Parties
This new trajectory of OBCs political
choice beginning in 2014
entails far-reaching political implications.
At one level, it has caused
phenomenal rise of the BJP. In the 2014
LS elections, the party swept the entire
Hindi belt. Of the 221 LS constituencies
that are allocated to this region, the
BJP alone won 186. With this, about 66
percent of the 282 seats the BJP won in
2014 came from this region. The party
maintained its dominance by repeating
the same comprehensive victory
in 2019. For many scholars of Indian
politics, it marks the return of the era
of one-party dominance, even poised
towards hegemony. This phenomenon
itself entails several consequences for
democratic politics and governance. 39
At another level, the remarkable
change in the political preference of the
backward castes has meant the decimation
of dominant social justice parties
in this part of country. For instance,
RJD’s overall vote share declined from
30.7 percent in 2004 to 20.1 percent in
2014 and then 15.4 percent in 2019. In
terms of seats, the loss has been one of
devastating, as its seat tally slid down
from twenty-four in 2004 to four seats
in 2014. Worse still, it drew a blank in
2019. For the first time in the history of
RJD, the party went unrepresented in
the LS. 40 Similarly, the SP’s vote share
and seat tally in LS elections have gone
down drastically. Its vote share plummeted
from 26.7 percent in 2004 to
18.1 percent in 2019. Its seat tally came
down from thirty-six in 2004 to five in
2014 and 2019. Simply put, the shift of
OBCs toward the BJP seems to have
broken the back of these parties.
Even so, it would be too early to
write them off, given the complex caste
dynamics that inform electoral politics
in the two states. For this reason alone,
doubt is cast if this is going to be a longterm
trend. And yet, both parties (RJD
and the SP) are faced with formidable
challenges to bring one of their important
social constituencies of support
back to their fold. It remains to be seen
how the two parties will frame issues,
restructure their political agenda, and
rejig party organizations so as to be able
reclaim much of the lost ground.
VI. The Upshot
The political mobilization the
backward castes/classes in the
early 1990s in the greater part
India fundamentally altered the vector
of democratic politics. Not only did it
restructure the pattern of party competition,
but it also reconfigured the
ruling class. Although the social justice
movement fizzled out too soon, a
few state-level parties arising out of the
movement continue to draw support
from a large subset, if not the majority,
of the backward castes and ruled
for several years in not only India’s two
most populous states—Bihar and UP—
but also in the heart of the Hindi belt.
But, of late, they have electorally suffered
so much so that they seem to be
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