The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was running state governments in four states – Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh – when the Babri mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992. Kalyan Singh, the BJP’s chief minister in Uttar Pradesh, was dismissed by the union government on December 6 itself for reneging on his promise to protect the mosque. The other three BJP state governments were also dismissed within a week. When reelections were held in these states, the BJP actually suffered losses in every state except Rajasthan. While it was the Congress which handed defeats to the BJP in Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the most surprising verdict came from the state which was the ground zero of Hindutva frenzy.

Even though the BJP marginally increased its vote share between the 1991 and 1993 elections in Uttar Pradesh, its seat tally fell from 221 to 177. The biggest reason for this was an alliance of two subaltern parties, namely Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP) and Kanshiram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). While the SP was an Other Backward Class (OBC) led off-shoot of the socialist stream of politics in India, the BSP was a party rooted in Ambedkarite politics with Scheduled Castes (SCs) as its core support base. The fact that an OBC-SC alliance managed to prevent the BJP from capturing power even as the Congress ceded ground to the BJP, gave rise to the thesis of Mandal politics being the best antidote to the politics of Kamandal (read Hindutva).

The BJP took some time, but eventually internalized the larger message from the Mandal setback it received in the 1993 Uttar Pradesh elections. The fifteen-year period between 1992 and 2007 saw four national elections in India. In the first three of these; 1996, 1998 and 1999, the BJP emerged as the single largest party and formed governments which lasted for thirteen days, thirteen months and then a full term of five years. While the BJP’s own electoral performance did not change much in these three elections-- it had 161 Lok Sabha MPs in 1996 and 182 in both 1998 and 1999-- what made the difference was its ability to get more allies to its side, many of which were parties which had common ground with the larger framework of Mandal politics in the country. It is through these allies that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came into shape and Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the first non-Congress prime minister to complete a full-term in office.

In order to accommodate such allies, the BJP also put the controversial issues of core Hindutva on the backburner. In hindsight, this proved to be a bad strategy for the BJP as it was left with the plank of neoliberal economic growth – best exemplified in the ‘India Shining’ campaign in the 2004 general elections – which would eventually lead to a shock defeat for the NDA in the 2004 general elections. For Mandal politics, the best times were yet to come. In 2007, the BSP managed to get a majority of its own in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and Mayawati became the first Dalit chief minister of India’s largest state. The fact that the BSP managed to attract significant upper caste support in these elections opened up questions of whether Mandal had managed to usurp the core social base of Kamandal in India.