Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra with party leaders celebrate the gains it made in the Lok Sabha polls during counting of votes, in Jaipur, Tuesday, June 4, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Results from the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which saw social justice and reservation take centre stage over the last two months, have now revealed that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been reduced to 55 seats (from 77) out of the total 131 reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the House of the People.
While the BJP lost 19 SC seats where it had incumbent MP’s across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Bihar, Punjab and West Bengal, it lost 10 of its ST seats across Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Rajasthan and West Bengal – with the Indian National Congress beating out the BJP in 12 of these SC seats and seven of these ST seats.
Some of the biggest losses for the BJP on these reserved seats were seen in Jharkhand’s Khunti, where the Congress’ Kali Charan Munda defeated former Jharkhand CM and Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda by a margin of nearly 1.5 lakh votes; in Rajasthan’s Banswara (ST), where the BJP lost to new entrant Bharat Adivasi Party by a margin of nearly 2.5 lakh votes, in Karnataka’s Chamrajanagar, where the loss margin to INC was over 1.88 lakh votes.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had won on 77 seats reserved for SC’s and ST’s, increasing this tally from 2014’s 71. Meanwhile, the Congress, which had won a combined seven SC and ST seats in 2019, managed victories in 32 of these constituencies in 2024.
The most damage to the BJP’s incumbents on SC and ST seats was seen in Uttar Pradesh, where it lost six of these seats – one to the Congress and five to INDIA member Samajwadi Party. In fact, the SP, which had won no SC seats in UP in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, ended up clocking a tally of seven SC seats in the State this time – the other two flipped from Bahujan Samaj Party (in Lalganj) and Apna Dal (Soneylal) (in Robertsganj).
Of the 55 reserved seats the BJP won this year, 25 were ST seats – down from 2019 tally of 32 – and 30 were SC seats – down from 45 in 2019.
These results come after two months of electioneering during the seven-phase voting process, which took a sharp turn after the first phase of voting on April 19. Days ahead of the second phase, as the Congress pushed hard on its social justice plank of a socio-economic caste-census, Prime Minister Narendra Modi signaled a change in the party’s rhetoric by positioning himself and his party as the only ones capable of rescuing reservations from Muslims, for SC/ST/OBC’s, further accusing the Congress and its allies of planning to “snatch” SC/ST/OBC quotas and give it to Muslims.
This rhetoric of the BJP, which was sustained till the end of the elections, came just as it was backing down from the earlier campaign slogan of “Ab Ki Baar, 400 paar”, which had caused panic among Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi voters. And even as Mr. Modi switched gears to reservations, he had re-purposed the “400 paar” slogan – now saying that the NDA needed 400 seats to stop SC/ST/OBC quotas from being apportioned to Muslims.
Some of the strongest remarks on reservation that Mr. Modi made came while he was campaigning in seats like Barabanki -SC (UP), Banswara -ST (Raj), Eatwah -SC (UP), Bharatpur (Raj) – all of which the BJP counted amongst its losses this Lok Sabha elections.
Even though the BJP lost 29 of the reserved seats where it had incumbents, it made gains on ST seats in West Bengal (Alipurduars), Chhattisgarh (Bastar), and Odisha (Nabarangpur and Keonjhar) and on SC seats in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur and Bhadrak constituencies with all of the BJP’s wins in Odisha coming from seats where the Biju Janta Dal had incumbents.
Further, it managed to retain all of its SC and ST seats in Madhya Pradesh, where all 29 Parliamentary Constituencies saw BJP winning.
