This piece of writing is not at all related to the recent by-polls conducted in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Nor is it concerning about other elections or by-elections of other states or parliamentary by-elections which were held Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government came to power at the centre in May 2014. But yes, this article is primarily concerned about the parliamentary elections that are to be held very soon after a year from now and secondarily its about the major Assembly elections that are going to be held this year in states like Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhay pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

The whole focus is concentrated for the approaching elections and not much attention will be given to what happened in the background because of which step, this elections analytical approach will fail.

Let’s start the talk by discussing the topic of recent by-elections, which are very much of extreme significance. The news is that the BJP lost two parliamentary seats, that is Gorakhpur which was held under the government of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and another one is Phulpur, which was held by deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya. Both the seats were lost and are incomprehensible to the ruling party.

The main reasons given for the tragedy are as here: First, their is an argument that the there was low voter turnout when compared to elections held in 2014 becoming the major factor. Second, the BJP did not anticipate the consolidation of the votes of Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, this turned into a ‘fiasco’ result. The third argument is, the consolidation of the Muslim vote.

The fact is that in the Gorakhpur by-poll the turnout fell by about 8 percent and in Phulpur by about 12 percent. The crucial reason given here is that the campaign was left for Chief Minister Aditynath to handle without much involvment of Party President Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This reason seems to be true, and another fact might also be the reason which is that the Uttar Pradesh government performance played a major role besides BJP’s general political and policy trajectories did not excite the voters to turn up in large numbers.

In a similar way, the pundits have noted, arithemtically summing up Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party votes would not have made numbers that would overturn the huge margins as achieved in 2014, when the polling for BJP was 550,000 votes in Gorakhpur and 500,000 in Phulpur. If corresponded, we get the figures of Samajwadi party and Bahujan Samaj Party put together as 360,000 and 400,000. With the fact that Samajwadi Party polled correspondingly 456,513 and 342,922 votes this time, arithmetically the BJP should have cruised. It is quit clear now that a significant section of BJP votes swung: it would not be a stretch to hypothesise that the non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs switched their allegiance, given BJP’s attitude to especially the former, and especially in Uttar Pradesh.