The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will have no member in the Rajya Sabha after November 25, when the six-year term of its lone MP, Ramji Gautam, will come to an end.
On Tuesday, the Election Commission (EC) announced elections to 10 vacant Rajya Sabha seats from the politically-significant and poll-bound Uttar Pradesh.
The party already has no presence in the Lok Sabha. Mayawati went on to become the chief minister for a fourth term. It will be for the first time since its Parliament debut in 1989 that the BSP, which emerged as a regional satrap and eventually attained national status, will have no representation in both Houses of Parliament. The 2012 UP assembly elections marked the turning point in the BSP’s decline. This was when the party’s tally fell from 206 seats to 80 and it was ousted from power. In the previous assembly elections, the BSP had won an absolute majority with 206 legislators in the 403-member assembly. Nationally, the shrinking of the BSP began in 2014, when the BJP – with 303 lawmakers – went on to form the government with a brute majority. The BSP, which had won 21 seats and 6.17% vote share in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, failed to win a single seat although its vote share stood at 4.19%. The BJP’s huge win in UP – bagging 71 of the 80 LS seats – was also attributed to the shift in the Dalit vote from the BSP to the party.
Because it lacks the numbers in the state assembly, while the BSP’s lone lawmaker is on the list of retirees, there is no possibility of the party getting another member in the Upper House.
In the subsequent Lok Sabha elections, the BSP showed signs of revival. It performed well in the 2019 general elections as part of the opposition’s Mahagathbandhan bloc (which included the SP and Rashtriya Lok Dal) but again faced a drubbing in the 2024 polls, when it chose to remain unallied with both the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Congress-led INDI alliance.
