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The Bahujan Samaj Party managed to win only one of the 403 assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, far from party president Mayawati's pre-poll claims that they would spring a surprise.
However, the BSP has managed to secure the third-highest vote share by bagging 12.9 per cent of the total votes polled in the state elections, according to Election Commission figures.
The assembly elections were swept by the Bharatiya Janata Party for a straight second term after it got the highest 41.3 per cent vote share, followed by the Samajwadi Party with 32 per cent votes, according to the Election Commission.
In the 2017 assembly polls, the BSP had contested all 403 seats and won only 19 of them while its deposit was forfeited on 81 seats. The party had polled over 22 per cent of the total votes cast in 2017.
The BSP, a national party fighting all constituencies in the state like it did in 2017, won the Rasara seat in Ballia district where its sitting MLA Umashankar Singh got 87,887 (or 43.82 per cent) of the total votes counted, the EC website showed.
He defeated nearest rival Mahendra of the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) by 6,583 votes, the EC website showed.
In the 2017 assembly polls, Singh had won the Rasara seat after he got 92,272 (or 48.16 per cent) of the votes polled that year.
Earlier in the day, candidates of the Mayawati-led party appeared in fight in around half a dozen seats including Hapur, Jalalpur and Menhdawal but did not win.
”Our party is preparing and contesting the polls with full might to once against form a government with full majority,” BSP supremo Mayawati had said on February 14 while addressing a rally in Orai.
The former UP chief minister had also trashed opinion polls that projected BJP and Samajwadi Party as main stakeholders in the state, claiming her party would repeat a 2009-like performance and spring a surprise.
After being an influential player in Uttar Pradesh politics for three decades, Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party has been relegated to the margins with the party set to witness its poorest performance ever in assembly polls.
When the BSP formed a government in Uttar Pradesh in 2007, it had bagged 206 seats and a vote share of 30.43 per cent.
Observers believe Mayawati failed to protect her core vote base from drifting towards the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. A part of the core voters deserted the BSP for the BJP as they felt that the ruling party had actually helped them through various welfare schemes. Some staunch BSP voters felt that the SP was the real force to represent the opposition space in Uttar Pradesh.
The party, observers claimed, also failed to check the narrative that it has "surrendered" to the BJP.B
Several of the leaders such as Indrajit Saroj, Lalji Verma, Ram Achal Rajbhar and Tribhuvan Dutt, who helped shape the BSP, also left the party for SP. Their exit from the BSP left the core voter in disarray which looked for other options in the state, including BJP and SP.
But some observers were of the view that the BJP was able to win over the "non-Yadav OBC" and "non-Jatav Dalit" voters of the SP and the BSP respectively.
The BSP achieved a better strike rate than the SP when it formed an alliance with the SP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. BSP won 10 seats in the Lok Sabha while SP won five.
Apparently, Mayawati took a "hasty" step of breaking the alliance and continuing it till the present assembly polls, observers said.
They felt that the BSP's grass-roots cadre was in favour of continuing the alliance to take on the BJP.
The BSP's latest performance is being seen in contrast with its 2007 show in assembly polls when Mayawati was credited with her formula of social engineering to attract Brahmins to a party which had a massive Dalit base.