The focus on social justice and reservation during the last two months of the Lok Sabha election campaign apparently led to the BJP’s reserved seat count being reduced to 55 from the previous 77 – a total of 131 constituencies are reserved for castes and scheduled tribes across the country. the country.
The BJP lost 19 SC seats it held in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Bihar, Punjab and West Bengal. Additionally, it lost 10 ST seats in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Rajasthan and West Bengal. The Congress captured 12 of these seats from the SC and seven of these seats from the ST from the BJP.
Other parties also contributed to the BJP’s losses in reserved seats: the Samajwadi Party (SP) won five SC seats in Uttar Pradesh; Trinamool Congress (TMC) won in Coochbehar; the Bharat Adivasi Party, a newcomer, got Banswara; Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) won in Dumka; and the Nationalist Congress Party-Sharad Pawar (NCP-SP) took Dindori.
Significant defeats for the BJP included Jharkhand’s Khunti, where Congress candidate Kali Charan Munda defeated former CM and Union tribal affairs minister Arjun Munda by nearly 1.5 lakh votes; Rajasthan’s Banswara, where the Bharat Adivasi Party won by nearly 2.5 lakh votes; and Chamarajanagar of Karnataka, where the BJP lost to the Congress by over 1.88 lakh votes.
In the 2019 elections, the BJP increased its tally from 71 to 77 reserved seats. The Congress, which had won just seven of those seats in 2019, increased its tally to 32 reserved constituencies in 2024, including the 19 it wrested from the BJP.
The BJP experienced its biggest losses in Uttar Pradesh, where it lost six SC and ST seats: one to the Congress and five to the Samajwadi Party. The SP, which had no SC seats in Uttar Pradesh in 2019, won seven this year, including two held by the BSP and Robertsganj, which was represented by Apna Dal-Soneylal.
The BSP also lost its only SC seat in Uttar Pradesh, Nagina, to Chandrashekhar Azad of the Azad Samaj Party, which it won by a margin of over 1.5 lakh votes.
Of the 55 reserved seats won by the BJP this year, 25 were ST seats (up from 32 in 2019) and 30 were SC segments (up from 45 in 2019).
The BJP made gains in ST seats in West Bengal (Alipurduar), Chhattisgarh (Bastar) and Odisha (Nabarangpur and Keonjhar), and in SC seats in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur and Bhadrak, all previously held by the BJD. Also, the BJP retained all its SC and ST seats in Madhya Pradesh, with Union social justice minister Virendra Kumar winning the Tikamgarh seat by over 4 lakh votes.
