Is the Muslim vote becoming irrelevant to BJP's electoral success in India?

While Muslim voters' preference of other political alignments remained unchanged, upper-caste Hindus and SC-ST voters got closer to the BJP in 2014

Apart from merely being a topic of interest of researchers, it is now quite well known that differences among socio-economic groups over caste, religion, education and wealth have an inescapable impact on politics in India. The way these differences, or ‘social cleavages’, affect electoral outcomes has, however, changed in the past few elections, especially the last general election in 2014.

While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Narendra Modi, might have received support from all sections of society to be able to form a majority government in 2014, research and survey data from independent sources indicate that