According to sources, the reason for the Congress—which sees the BSP as a contender for the important Dalit vote in Delhi—to be tense is because the BSP had bagged 17 seats in the MCD polls last year besides gaining an overwhelming majority of Dalit votes in neighbouring UP.

There are 12 Assembly seats and one Parliamentary seat in Delhi reserved for the Scheduled Castes.

Moreover, Dalits number almost 17 per cent of the population of Delhi. Mayawati’s caste (Jatav or Chamar) constitutes 38.1 per cent of this.

The proportion of people belonging to the Scheduled Caste in the population of the newly delimited Chandni Chowk is 15.99 per cent, in north-east Delhi it is 17.3 per cent, 15.23 per cent in east Delhi, 17.73 per cent in New Delhi, 21.52 per cent in north-west Delhi (which is reserved for the Scheduled Caste), 13.03 per cent in west Delhi and and 17.73 per cent in south Delhi parliamentary seats.

In other words, if the BSP—fresh after its UP victory—replaces the Congress as the preferred party of Delhi’s Dalits, it can surely defeat the Congress even if it fails to register victories itself, say sources.

In many of the MCD seats won by the BSP for instance, the BJP was second, indicating that the BSP replaced the Congress as the preferred party of Dalits, thereby relegating the Congress to the third position.

AICC secretary Jai Kishan, a prominent Dalit face of the Congress in Delhi, said the Congress would soon hold a Dalit panchayat in Delhi to prove that “Dalit activists are with the Congress and that only ticket-seekers were with Mayawati”.

He alleged that the BSP and the BJP “divided people on the basis of caste and religion”.

Congress MLA Rajesh Lilothia claimed Mayawati had misused the official machinery of UP to “force” people to come to Delhi for the BSP rally.

The leaders also claimed that Mayawati “had done nothing for Dalits in UP and that all she had done was to amass personal wealth in their name”. They claimed the Congress was instrumental in the progress of Dalits post-independence.

According to political experts, the problem that the Congress party faces in North India is that though the reservation policy created a small Dalit elite in government jobs, it did not get a good share at top political decision-making levels.

This denial of political agency—as a political expert Sudha Pai calls this—led to this Dalit elite to break away from the Congress and join late Kanshi Ram’s BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation), DS-4 (Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti) and, later, the BSP.