Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 9

Introduction
managed to make among the numerically
large Other Backward Classes
(OBC) of voters, especially in the Hindi
heartland states. There was a time when
nearly 50 percent of OBC votes were
divided between Congress and the BJP
and the other 50 percent of OBC votes
were cornered by various regional parties
dominant in different states. Things
begun to change during the 2014 Lok
Sabha elections when the BJP managed
to make some inroads among the OBC,
but the 2019 elections witnessed massive
inroads of the BJP among OBC
voters, especially the lower OBC. This
did not happen all of a sudden, but was
very strategically worked toward by the
BJP by isolating the dominant OBC
caste who voted for one of the other regional
parties within a state and focusing
on mobilizing the non-dominant
OBC caste (also referred as lower OBC)
mainly in the states of UP and Bihar, but
also in some other states. How the OBC
voted in different states is analyzed by
Sanjeer Alam in his article “The Backwards
Turn Right in the Hindi Belt:
Trajectories and Implications” using the
Lokniti-CSDS NES 2019 data. Not only
did the OBC, Dalits, and Adivasis vote
for the BJP in a big way, young voters
(ages eighteen to twenty-five) also voted
for the BJP in large numbers. The age
as a political category was hardly evident
in Indian elections before the 2014
Lok Sabha elections. Age has become
significant as a political category only
since 2014 Lok Sabha elections, when
young voters started voting in very
large numbers; their turnout was higher
compared to the average turnout and
they voted in favor of the BJP in much
bigger numbers compared to voters of
other age groups. This was largely due
to their attraction to and faith in Narendra
Modi. This trend, which begun
in 2014, more or less continued during
the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and Vibha
Attri and Jyoti Mishra provide a detail
account of how young voters voted in
2019 in their article “The Young Vote in
Lok Sabha Elections 2019.”
The Mahagathbandan failed to
perform well in UP, contrary to popular
belief that the SP-BSP alliance would
put the BJP in a difficult situation. The
BJP received more than 50 percent of
the votes in forty-one Lok Sabha constituencies
in UP, neutralizing the effect
of the numerical dominance of the SP-
BSP alliance. Similarly, the NDA alliance
polled 50+ percent of the votes in
thirty-one of the forty Lok Sabha seats
in Bihar. The BJP’s increased vote share
in UP compared to 2014 Lok Sabha
election caused many to believe that
Muslims may have also voted for the
BJP in large numbers. The evidence
from the NES 2019 suggests that there
was hardly any increase in Muslim support
for the BJP either in UP or in other
parts of India. Evidence suggests that
only 8 percent of Muslims voted for the
BJP nationally and the figures remained
the same for UP. A detailed account of
how Muslims voted in different states is
presented by Hilal Ahmed in his article
“Does Muslim Vote Matter? Presence,
Representation, Participation.”
The story of 2019 cannot be
completed without investigating why
Congress failed so miserably. One
could understand the party’s defeat in
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