In the past, Dalits have been successfully mobilized by various political parties across the country (Chandra, 2004). The monopoly of the Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) over Dalit votes declined considerably after the emergence of an effective opposition in many states in the post-emergency period. This period also witnessed the arrival of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a major claimant of Dalit votes in north India (Pai, 2002). The 2014 Lok Sabha elections marked a significant shift in Dalit voting patterns, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning nearly one-fourth of Dalit votes. While support for the BJP among Dalits in 2014 largely comprised upwardly mobile segments – urban, educated, middle class, with high media exposure (Kumar and Gupta, 2018) – our analysis of the results of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as well as the 2022 Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly elections suggests that the party now enjoys broad-based support among Dalit communities. The party managed to secure one-third of Dalit votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, which was nearly three times that of the BSP.

While the Congress witnessed a secular decline in votes across caste groups in 2014, why Dalits also deserted the BSP in North India remains unclear. Furthermore, many observers expressed doubts over the BJP's ability to retain its support base among Dalits in the 2019 elections. During prime minister Narendra Modi's first term, the apparent dissatisfaction owing to incidents of flogging of Dalit youth and protests against proposed changes to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, among others, had led many observers to express doubts over the BJP's ability to retain its support base among the Dalits in the 2019 elections. How did the BJP then manage to remain as the pre-eminent choice of Dalit voters in many parts of the country in 2019? More importantly, what explains the shifts in Dalit voting patterns since the 1990s?

We begin with a broad overview of voting patterns among Dalits since the 1990s. We extensively draw on National Election Studies (NES) data to provide evidence of how the BJP has fared among Dalit voters in various states in the past two national elections.