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I’m a researcher and writer interested in politics, history, media, and contemporary affairs. My work focuses on digging into facts, examining narratives, and understanding the ideas and events shaping India and its public discourse.
On 12 November 2026, Lucknow saw a new political partnership take shape between two leaders. One was Asaduddin Owaisi, the chief of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). The other was Chandrashekhar Azad “Ravan”, the Nagina MP and chief of the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram). AIMIM’s spokesperson Shadab Chauhan confirmed that the two parties would join hands in the 2027 UP assembly elections. He said, “The nature of the pact and other details will be revealed on Thursday during the press conference to be addressed by AIMIM and Bhim Army leadership.” In the afternoon, at a joint press conference, they announced a front called the Samajik Parivartan Morcha. Chandrashekhar told the reporters, “This is not a third front; this is the first front, if you think deeply”.
The idea is simple. In Uttar Pradesh, Dalits are about of 21% population, while Muslims are about 19%. Together, they make up 40% of the most populous state. On paper, it looks unbeatable. But this isn’t new. It’s one of the oldest bargains in Indian politics, and it even has a name: Bhim-Mim. “Bhim” stands for Bhimrao Ambedkar and the Dalit movement he built. “Mim” stands for the Muslim vote, and in its newest version, for Owaisi.
So, here is the question: When Dalits and Muslims join hands at the elections, who actually gains? History says it all. From Bengal in 1946 to Lucknow in 2022, it gives an answer that nobody wants to say out loud. Dalits bring the votes, but someone else takes the seats.
In simple words, the formula has been tried many times. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s party tried it in the 1940s, and he ended up warning Dalits against it. Mayawati tried it for three decades and lost her party. Now Chandrashekhar is trying it again.
In this article, we’ll discuss the numbers first, then trace three experiments: Ambedkar’s, Mayawati’s and Chandrashekhar’s. Finally, it asks who got the seats each time. Let’s begin with the numbers.
Every Dalit-Muslim alliance in UP begins with the same sum. According to the 2011 Census, UP has 4.14 crore Scheduled Castes, or 20.7% of its population, and 3.85 crore Muslims, or 19.26%. Together, that is nearly 8 crore people, or, simply put, around 40% of the state. But there is a catch. The data is now 15 years old. UP’s population has grown a great deal since 2011, but we don’t have current numbers, so nobody knows the exact shares today. Political parties mostly assume that Dalits and Muslims still make up roughly the same proportion as before. In other words, the working estimate is that “40%” is still the combined share. That’s why every Bhim-Mim leader uses these numbers.
If we look further, the Dalit side carries real weight in seats. UP has 86 reserved Assembly seats, including 84 for SCs and 2 for STs, and Dalits decide the result on about 67 seats by sheer numbers. In other words, any party that wants to conquer UP in elections needs Dalit support. But the Dalit vote is not a single block. It includes the Jatavs, Mayawati’s own community, who make up 54% of UP’s SC population or about 11% of the state. The Non-Jatav block includes the Pasis, Dhobis, Koris and Khatiks, who make up most of the rest, and they are the ones who switch sides to other parties.
The Muslim side of the sum has never moved as easily as the formula assumes. For example, if we look at the BSP, even at the peak, Muslim support for the party was around 17 to 20%. Most Muslims voted for the Samajwadi Party. So far, we have talked about UP; now let’s move to where the formula actually works.
If Bhim-Mim can work anywhere, it is in western Uttar Pradesh. The population of Muslims are about 26% of the region, against about 19% for the state as a whole. In reality, the story lies in a tight belt of eight districts in the northwest region close to Delhi. Let’s go into more detail.
Rampur has a Muslim share of 50.57%, and five more districts are above 40%: Moradabad (47.12%), Bijnor (43.04%), Saharanpur (41.95%), Muzaffarnagar (41.30%) and Amroha (40.78%). In Bareilly (34.54%) and Meerut (34.43%), they are about one-third of the population. Taken together, these eight districts are 41.42% Muslim. In simple words, this belt is home to only 14% of UP’s people, but it includes 30% of the Muslims, about 1.17 crore. And the share has been rising: in these eight districts, it went up from 39.54% in 2001 to 41.42% in 2011. If that trend continued, the share today is likely a little higher.
Basically, these numbers decide seats. Muslim voters play a crucial role in at least 70 Assembly seats in the region. And if we talk about Dalits, they are present across the same belt, but in smaller numbers. According to the 2011 Census, Scheduled Castes make up 22.05% of Saharanpur and 21.38% of Bijnor, slightly above the state average of 20.7%. Elsewhere, they are fewer: Meerut 18.12%, Amroha 17.28%, Moradabad 15.33%, Muzaffarnagar 13.55%, Rampur 13.18% and Bareilly 12.52%. Across all eight districts, Dalits are about 16.5% of the population, below the state average.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when the SP and BSP fought together, the BSP won the Muslim-Dalit seats of Saharanpur, Bijnor, Nagina and Amroha, while the SP took Moradabad, Rampur and Sambhal. But how does a candidate actually win a seat like that?
After the 2022 election, it became more obvious that a Muslim candidate cannot win on Muslim votes alone. They also need the party’s core vote. For the BSP, that core vote was always Dalit. In simple words, in West UP, even in the Muslim-dominated areas, Dalit votes are what carry a candidate over the line. But the problem is that the winner is not always a Dalit. In 2019, two of the BSP’s four West UP winners, in Saharanpur and Amroha, were Muslim candidates elected on the back of Dalit votes. Dalits did the lifting; someone else took the seat. We will come back to this pattern later. First, let’s talk about the formula Babasaheb Ambedkar used in the 1940s and end up warning Dalits against it.
The first Dalit-Muslim political partnership was not born in Lucknow. It was born in Bengal, more than 75 years ago. It involved the most important Dalit leader in Indian History.
In 1946, India was choosing the Constituent Assembly that would write the Constitution. The assembly members were not elected directly through the votes. They were chosen by the newly elected provincial assemblies. The Assembly had 296 members; 31 of them were Dalits. Babasaheb Ambedkar was the leader of the Scheduled Castes Federation(SCF), and he wanted to be one of them. Actually, there was one problem. His home province, the Bombay Presidency, did not pick him. He even went to Calcutta to seek the support of the European members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, but they had already decided to stay out of the election. Ambedkar went back to Delhi, disappointed. In simple words, the man who would later chair the Constitution’s Drafting Committee was close to being left out of the Assembly altogether. But Bengal saved him.
That is when Jogendra Nath Mandal stepped in. He was a Dalit lawyer from Barisal (now in Bangladesh) and the leader of Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation in Bengal. He invited Ambedkar to contest from the Jessore-Khulna constituency, in a province where the Muslim League was in power. This was the first major experiment in what is today called Bhim-Mim politics. Ambedkar won. How he won is still debated. Basically, he was elected with five transferable votes, when four were needed. The SCF did not have five members in the Bengal assembly. So, according to the historians, the votes came from the Muslim League. Whatever the exact count, Ambedkar entered the Constituent Assembly from Muslim League-ruled Bengal.
The victory did not last. In 1947, when India got independence and Jessore-Khulna went to East Pakistan, Ambedkar lost his seat in the Assembly. Rajendra Prasad wrote to B.G. Kher, the Premier of Bombay, asking that Ambedkar be elected on a Congress ticket, and he returned to the Assembly from the seat vacated by M.R. Jayakar. But what happened to Jogendra Nath Mandal? His story ended far worse. He had a clear reason for working with the League. As he later wrote, he believed the economic interests of Bengal’s Muslims and Scheduled Castes were the same. According to him, both were mostly cultivators and labourers, and both communities were lagging behind in education. So, when Pakistan was created, he decided to stay there. He became Pakistan’s first Law Minister. The reality of the Dalit-Muslim partnership was laid bare within three years.
Dalits in East Pakistan faced riots and atrocities, and Mandal found the government unwilling to act against the rioters. Basically, for Muslims, they were not only Dalits, but primarily Hindus whom they saw as a enemy. In 1950, he fled to Kolkata and sent his resignation to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan from there. The letter listed 36 specific reasons for quitting. India did not welcome him back either. No political party accepted him, and many Hindus had already branded him a Pakistani. He died in 1968 in Bangaon, West Bengal, almost forgotten.
In simple words, the first political leader to try the Dalit-Muslim alliance was also its first victim. But what about Ambedkar? Did he still promote the Dalit-Muslim alliance?
Ambedkar had watched all this closely. By November 1947, he had made up his mind. While addressing the press as Law Minister, he said: “It has become a habit with the Scheduled Castes to look upon the Muslims as their friends simply because they dislike Hindus. This is a mistaken view.” He went further and said: “It would be fatal for the Scheduled Castes, whether in Pakistan or in Hyderabad, to put their faith in Muslims or the Muslim League.”
Ambedkar warned that “the Scheduled Castes there should under no circumstances side with the Nizam and the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen”. Remember these words; they reflected Ambedkar’s own experience with Muslims. Ambedkar’s warning had come three years before Mandal’s fall. When Mandal fled Pakistan in 1950, it was as if events had proved Babasaheb right.
After Ambedkar, the idea went quiet for four decades. It came back in the 1980s, when Kanshi Ram built the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh. And this time, it was tested not once, but again and again.
In 1993, UP saw its first big Bhim-Mim experiment. Most Muslims were loyal supporters of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, and most Dalits voted for Kanshi Ram’s BSP. So when the two parties joined hands to stop the BJP at the peak of the Ram temple movement, Muslim and Dalit votes came together too. Their slogan became famous: “Mile Mulayam Kanshiram, hawa ho gaye Jai Shri Ram” (when Mulayam and Kanshiram meet, Jai Shri Ram vanishes). It worked at first. The alliance won 176 seats, and Mulayam became Chief Minister. On paper, the narrative was simple: Dalits and Muslims were together.
The reality was different. Within two years, the BSP pulled out. On 2 June 1995, SP workers attacked Mayawati at the Lucknow state guest house. The very next day, she became Chief Minister with the support of the BJP, the party the alliance had been formed to stop.
In simple words, the votes came together, but the parties did not. The first Bhim-Mim alliance in UP lasted less than two years and ended in violence. It set a pattern that Dalits would be there for votes, but they could not be the main beneficiaries. We can see the next big example in the BSP’s seat distribution from the 2017 to 2023 elections.
In 2017, Mayawati fielded 99 Muslim candidates. It was the highest in the party’s History. But it backfired. Muslims mostly voted for the SP, leaving the BSP with just 19 seats. The Bhim-MIM alliance didn’t work. Two years later, in the 2019 general election, she joined hands with the SP once again and won 10 Lok Sabha seats, but the exchange was uneven. SP votes moved to BSP candidates, but BSP votes did not move the other way. Even in these elections, Muslim candidates benefited, as we had already discussed.
By the 2022 assembly elections, the BSP had gone back to fighting alone and gave tickets to 88 Muslim candidates. Not one of them won. The party managed just one seat in the entire state, and Muslim support for the BSP fell to 6%. Even in the 2023 urban body polls, when 64% of its mayoral tickets went to Muslim candidates, the result was the same. All these years, the Bhim-MIM alliance failed. But the BSP didn’t lose hope.
Let’s take the example of Shah Alam, better known as Guddu Jamali, from Azamgarh. He won the Mubarakpur Assembly seat twice on a BSP ticket, but lost the Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat in 2014, finishing third. In 2021, he quit the BSP, sought an SP ticket, and when that failed, contested on Owaisi’s AIMIM ticket and lost. Yet in 2022, Mayawati called him back and gave him the Azamgarh ticket again. He lost once more. In 2024, he left the BSP for the SP. In a seat where Dalits make up about 25% of the population and Muslims about 16%, the BSP kept handing its ticket to a Muslim leader who kept losing and finally walked away.
While the BSP chased Muslim votes, its Dalit base walked away. Non-Jatav Dalit support fell from 44% to 23% between 2017 and 2022, and Jatav support slipped from 87% to 65%. In 2024, the BSP won no Lok Sabha seats, its vote share fell to 9.39%, and it didn’t even finish second anywhere. Nagina, a BSP seat in 2019, went to Chandrashekhar Azad. In other words, the party Kanshi Ram built to give Dalits power now has no MP in the Lok Sabha and no MLA in Uttar Pradesh. When its last Rajya Sabha member’s term ends on 25 November 2026, the BSP will have no one in Parliament for the first time in 37 years.
When the BSP collapsed, a young man from Saharanpur stepped into the gap. He is trying to do the same thing that Ambedkar warned about. Earlier, we discussed Chandrashekhar and Owaisi announcing a new political partnership. First, let’s talk about Chandrashekhar Azad.
Chandrashekhar Azad founded the Bhim Army in 2014. After the 2017 Saharanpur caste clashes, he was jailed, and he came out as the most recognised young Dalit face in UP. In 2020, he launched the Azad Samaj Party. His first test went badly: talks with the SP failed in 2022, and when he contested Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur, he got just 3% of the vote.
Then came 2024. Chandrashekhar won Nagina, a seat reserved for Scheduled Castes with an estimated 46% Muslim voters, by 1,51,473 votes. Nagina’s Muslims backed him over the SP, and the BSP, which had won the seat in 2019, fell to 1.33%. The formula worked here. But since Nagina is reserved, only a Dalit could win it anyway. Muslim voters were choosing which Dalit would win, not whether a Dalit would win.
The Nagina magic didn’t carry. In the 2024 by-elections, all three of his Muslim candidates lost their deposits. In Bihar in 2025, Azad’s party joined a front with AIMIM, which won five seats while his party won none. By 2026, both Chandrashekhar and Owaisi had been rejected by the SP and Congress, and Mayawati refused all alliances. In simple words, the Samajik Parivartan Morcha is a partnership of two leaders that the bigger parties didn’t want. And here lies the historical irony. In 1947, Ambedkar told Hyderabad’s Dalits never to side with the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. Owaisi’s AIMIM is that same Majlis, revived in 1958. Still, 79 years later, Babasaheb’s most visible young follower in UP has joined hands with its successor.
So far, we have seen three leaders. Now ask two simple questions of every Bhim-Mim experiment: who supplied the votes, and who got the seats?
It began in Bengal. Mandal’s Dalit followers backed the Muslim League, and the League got its Pakistan. Mandal got a ministry for three years and then fled for his life, while the Dalits he left behind in East Pakistan faced violence. In UP, the BSP followed the same path. In 2007, 29 of its Muslim candidates became MLAs, and Naseemuddin Siddiqui, the party’s Muslim face, held powerful portfolios. When the BSP lost in 2017, he and the party parted ways. In 2019, three of the BSP’s ten MPs were Muslims, all elected on the party’s Dalit base. Most of the ten later left the BSP. Afzal Ansari won Ghazipur again on an SP ticket. Then, in 2022, the BSP gave 88 tickets to Muslim candidates.
So who gains when Dalits and Muslims vote together? In Bengal, the League got Pakistan. In UP, the BSP’s Muslim leaders left when the party fell into hard times. In Maharashtra and Bihar, AIMIM kept the seats. The one exception, Nagina, was a seat only a Dalit could win. But that seat was also reserved. So it wasn’t a choice of whether a Dalit was elected, but which Dalit was elected.
In 2007, Dalits and Muslim voted together, and the BSP won a majority, because Dalits led a broad coalition. Every time the formula shrank to Dalit + Muslim, it failed the Dalits.
Now Chandrashekhar, with one MP and no MLAs, has joined Owaisi, whose party has a national brand and a clear goal of leading UP’s Muslims. The question for 2027 is simple: on this front, will Dalits lead, or only bring the votes again?
Ambedkar answered that question in 1947. Mayawati ignored it and lost her party. The alliance is new, but the bargain is old, and History says Dalits pay the bill. In 2027, UP’s Dalit voters will decide whether to pay it again.
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