Interpreting massive verdicts such as the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections pose a number of challenges to social scientists. The sweeping character of the results does not give much variations to interpret. In this particular case, the 2017 results are strikingly similar to the 2014 General Election results, with the BJP bagging nearly 80 per cent of the seats and nearly 40 per cent of the vote share.

A closer look at the data and its contextualisation into a timeline of elections, however, gives us some interpretative keys.

Between 2012 and 2017, the BJP has scored an impressive gain of 24.7 per cent of vote share, which is more than the total vote share obtained by the BSP (22.2 per cent) or the SP (21.8 per cent). But the SP and Congress vote shares were misleading since they together contested in only 305 seats, due to their alliance. The SP’s vote share in seats where it contested rose to 28.3 per cent, which was barely 1 per cent less than in 2012. In contrast, the Congress’s vote share in seats where it contested was 22 per cent, which indicates that the alliance with the SP did not work well. SP supporters did not transfer their votes to the Congress to the same extent that supporters of the latter did, assuming there were Congress supporters.

The gap between the BJP and the rest, and the roughly even distribution of votes between the other two main opponents maximised the disproportionality effect of the electoral system. In other words, the BJP’s 39.7 per cent vote share converted into 77 per cent of the seats, while the SP’s 28 per cent vote share only yielded 11 per cent of the seats. The SP went down from 224 to 47 seats with 1 per cent drop in vote share. The situation is worse for the BSP, which reaped only 4.7 per cent of the seats for 22 per cent vote share,

as well as for the Congress, which, despite bagging 22 per cent vote share, won less than 2 per cent of the seats.

Where did the BJP votes come from? One way to find out is to look at the aggregate vote share of major parties, which increased significantly in 2017.

Aggregate vote share of major parties
Source: Adapted from ECI Data, TCPD

This means that the share of voters who are not aligned with any major party and vote for small parties or independent candidates has decreased. It shows that people now tend to vote more strategically in favour of candidates or parties which stand a chance of winning. It is highly probable that the BJP succeeded to consolidate this ‘floating electorate’.

These voters remained organised around castes and it would appear that the BJP’s strategy to mobilise all non-aligned voters—the non-Jatav Dalits, non-Yadavs and non-Muslims— paid off. What contributed to the consolidation of the floating electorate with the BJP was the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the star campaigner of the BJP throughout the polling. Other factors included the relative weakness of other parties’ leadership, and the deployment of an impressive electoral machinery.

The profile of the new Assembly, however, remains heavily skewed in favour of the upper castes, which make 48 per cent of the BJP’s MLAs and 44 per cent of the Assembly. The BJP, thus, retains its upper caste bias, betraying a disjuncture between the PM’s inclusive discourse and the sociology of his party in Uttar Pradesh.

Caste Composition of UP Vidhan Sabha from 1962 to 2017
Source: Indian legislators and candidates dataset, TCPD