5 Reasons Why It’s Unfair for Mayawati to Blame Muslim Voters for BSP’s Debacle in UP Elections 2022

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Reason #3: Muslims Voted Strategically Against the BJP, Why Blame Them?

Let’s look at a couple of interesting constituencies in the 2017 UP election results to understand this point better.

In 2017, in the constituency of Bhojipura in Bareilly district, the BJP candidate Bahoran Lal Maurya won with a total of 1 lakh votes. The SP candidate Shazil Ansari came second with 72,000+ votes. And in third place was another Muslim candidate, of the BSP, who polled as many 49.8k votes.

A similar phenomenon took place in Nanpara in the district of Bahraich. In 2017, the Muslim vote had got split there between Congress candidate Waris Ali (who got over 67k votes) and BSP candidate Abdul Waheed (who got over 25k votes).

Together, their share came to above 93k votes). But given the split, the BJP candidate Madhuri Verma won with 86k votes.

Muslim votes getting split between the SP, BSP and Congress often resulted in the BJP candidate winning the seat, as evidenced in 2017.

So, what changed this time? With a consolidation of the Muslim behind SP, this phenomenon was avoided in certain places.

For example, in Bhojipura itself, Bahoran Lal Maurya once again stood on a BJP ticket, and polled over 1.09 lakh votes.

But the Muslim vote did not get split. It consolidated behind the SP candidate Shazil Ansari, who polled 1.19 lakh votes, and won the seat by a margin of 9,409 votes. Support for the BSP candidate was decisively whittled down to under 27,000 votes, making all the difference and defeating the BJP in this seat in Bareilly.

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