Political parties continue to limit the participation of tribal and Dalit leaders to reserved constituencies only. Between the Congress and the BJP, the two major national parties gave ticket to only three Scheduled Caste candidates in the ‘general’ category in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, The Hindu’s analysis of data shows.
While only SCs and STs can contest the 84 and 47 seats reserved for them respectively, there is no bar on who can contest the 412 ‘general’ seats in the country. In fact, both the Constituent Assembly debates and the deliberations of the Delimitation Commission in 2008 state clearly that the expectation was not that political parties would restrict SC and ST leaders to reserved constituencies only.
Yet, in practice that is exactly what is happening. Of the 6,711 candidates who contested the 412 ‘general’ seats in the 2014 polls, 1,027 were Scheduled Caste, as per their affidavits submitted to the Election Commission. These SC candidates are, however, overwhelmingly Independents, less than half belonged to political parties.
Among political parties, the BSP leads the way, having given tickets to 134 SC candidates to contest in ‘general’ seats. However, in U.P., the only State in which the party was truly in the reckoning, it gave ticket along caste lines and not a single SC candidate got a ticket in the 'general' seat. “The BSP post-2009 is primarily a U.P.-based party and its pocket of influence outside the State is very limited,” Rahul Verma, a political scientist with the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, explained in an email. “There might be a symbolic value attached to nominating SC candidates in general constituencies, however, the value of seeking a BSP nomination outside U.P. is very low and the SCs getting the BSP nomination in general constituencies is largely a function of the BSP's limited presence,” he said.
As in previous years, >T.N. continues to lead among the States , with a fifth of all candidates in general seats being SC candidates, but neither of the two Dravidian parties nominated a single SC candidate in a general seat. The 2014 participation of SC candidates in reserved seats in T.N., moreover, is lower than it was in 2009.
Just 168 ST candidates contested in ‘general’ seats, nearly half of them Independents. Both major parties said while diversity was an important consideration, “winnability’ was the basis on which tickets were given.
