The BJP was originally seen as purely an urban party, but its success in UP— India’s largest state— has been driven by rural and “rurban” voters. According to Mehta, the BJP “has become the default party of the village” in UP
In 2019, 68.9% of the BJP’s Lok Sabha (lower house) MPs were non-“upper caste”, a fact that “flew in the face of assertions in recent political science research on India that claimed a significant resurgence of upper-caste dominance between 2009 and 2019 within the BJP”
Turns out the data used by political scientists including @jaffrelotc in their analysis of the BJP’s 2019 win were simply wrong, but it likely escaped scrutiny because they supported prevailing narratives re: “upper caste” dominance in the BJP
“At best, this was shoddy research caused by a lack of understanding of ground realities. The basic factual mistakes in the core database unfortunately led scholars and observers who use it ti come up with an incorrect or incomplete assessment of the evidence…”
Though the BJP as a whole has shifted towards OBCs, it has focused its outreach on marginalized sub-groups within the OBC umbrella. These differences are often obscured through reductive references to “upper” and “lower” castes
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