Post-Kanshi, BSP may become UP-centric

With Kanshi Ram's exit from the political scene, all the indications are that the Bahujan Samaj Party, which had benefitted electorally from his vision, will tend to become a UP-centric party.

Enthused by the vote share the BSP had been nibbling away from the major parties, it fielded 435 candidates across 25 States/Union Territories in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections "" more than the candidates fielded either by the Bharatiya Janata Party (364) or the Congress (417).

Largely as a result of Kanshi's ambition of telling both state and national parties that they needed the BSP to form a government, since 1991, the goal of the BSP was just to contest elections, whether it won them or not was not material.

Since the 1991 general elections, the BSP has been contesting over 200 seats and its vote share has steadily gone up from mere 1.80 per cent to 4.16 per cent in the 2000 Lok Sabha elections. In 1996, the party hit a peak of 11.21 per cent.

Whether it was Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan or Haryana, the BSP tried its hand everywhere. In the 1989 general elections, the BSP's vote share in Uttar Pradesh stood at just under 10 per cent, but it doubled by 1996. So much so that the Congress under P V Narasimha Rao entered into an agreement with it for the Assembly elections that year as a junior partner.

But now, with Kanshi Ram, the master tactician, gone, whether the Congress will be able to strike a deal with the BSP before the Assembly elections is yet to be seen.

The BSP's politics in Delhi is mimicked by it elsewhere in the country "" although the party knows full well it might not be able to win the elections, it has demonstrated that it could play a crucial role in the victory margins of the Congress candidates. The same phenomenon was seen in the Chhattisgarh Assembly elections:

BSP did not win too many seats itself but succe-ssfully damaged the Congress' prospects, contesting in 54 seats and polling 4.4 per cent of the votes.

But with Mayawati's eyes firmly fixed on UP, this could be a thing of the past. This is likely to affect the BSP's chances of further growth.