• Anti-incumbency is not an irrational whim. In each election, voters choose a predominant factor on which anti-incumbency rides. In Bihar, it was non-governance, in Madhya Pradesh in 2003 it was roads and power, in Uttar Pradesh this time, it was law and order. A population desperate to rid itself of “goonda-raj” saw in Mayawati the one leader capable of delivering. The one positive achievement of her last reign — upper castes and Muslims acknowledged right through the state — was better law and order.

Muslims vote tactically to defeat the BJP because they want security. But when a state is engulfed in lawlessness, even the majority community, even the upper castes, feel insecure. They need more than Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone to reassure them. Congress was not going to get anywhere near power. BJP did not project a strong enough leader and also sullied its book with the CD and with its failure to prevent its middling campaigners from running a communal campaign even as its top leaders stayed in the middle.

In 2007, voters in Uttar Pradesh, even upper castes, were not willing to vote a government that might have brought back the instability of BJP’s Ramjanambhoomi days. So security, law and order, end to goonda raj were now the equivalent of bijli, sadak, pani.

• While it is true that the three other contestants also moved closer to the centre as the campaign progressed, they were still trying to revive the magic of old vote banks. Congress was still hoping to get the Muslims back — that is why Rahul was persuaded to open the campaign with Babri, and paid a much publicised visit to Deoband. BJP, similarly, was trashing the Muslims and suggesting — not always subtly — that the state’s law and order problems had something to do with Mulayam’s pro-minority politics, in the hope of reviving a Hindu wave. Mulayam’s campaign, too, was ultimately directed at his traditional vote banks, Muslims and Yadavs. The truth is, he mostly retained it and yet got wiped out.

All three missed a central point, the pivot around which the new politics of India is being built. That the days of narrow, vote-bank politics are now over. You can no longer secure 25-27 per cent vote in a fractured polity and rule a state. You now need to broaden your agenda, invite, entice, and include others too. Because it is logical that a fast-developing, fast-urbanising society should also evolve a more cosmopolitan outlook. It is tired of divisive agendas, of being taken for granted.

People are now more aware, they resent being treated like mere vote banks. They think, and think hard. Only then the Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh turn the clock back on 5,000 years of reverse prejudice to consciously elect an entirely unapologetic Dalit. Mayawati had the political intellect to sense this change, to understand this impatience, the mind of this new voter who is no longer shackled by the hatreds and insecurities of the past. She was helped along by her much older, more experienced opponents who were only trying to revive the magic of their past. They failed to see that the voter has now moved on — he looks ahead rather than behind.

• The third point, and the old political class may still be reluctant to see it, is that the voter, increasingly, gives clear verdicts. That is why, in state after state, the column “others” is being emptied out. In Punjab, Congress lost despite its vote going up by nearly five per cent. That is because “others,” including the Left parties and the BSP lost much more and the Akali-BJP combine got a bigger share of it.

In Uttar Pradesh also, the “others” have nearly halved, the Left wiped out of even its tiny foot hold of four seats despite Mulayam’s support. Clear verdicts are now becoming as strong a phenomenon as anti-incumbency. And while the phenomenon began sometime in 2003, the real turning point was the second Bihar election of 2005, when the same electorate which had given an unclear verdict just a few months earlier, cleared all doubts and brought about decisive change.

So anybody who now goes to the polls saying, give me 20-30-40 seats so I can be king-maker, so I can hold a coalition by its jugular or whatever, is asking for the boot. People no longer want to vote for the spoilers. This trend will only strengthen now and any party, or coalition, that does not appreciate it, will pay for it in 2009.

As the Uttar Pradesh picture became clearer by Friday afternoon, my first caller was Sachin Pilot. Now what does this say for the theory you been putting forward that the voter is moving towards the Centre, he asked? If the voter moves away from both Congress and BJP, is it a move to the Centre, or the fringes?

Good question.

And the answer, as they say, is blowing in the Uttar Pradesh wind. The voter will not necessarily choose only between the two national parties. He is moving towards the centre of the political, ideological spectrum, not towards one party or the other. That middle-of-the-road, inclusivist, positive, forward-looking politics defines his new outlook and echoes this new, aspirational upsurge in — and I repeat — a rapidly urbanising, cosmopolitan India. Now think about which party or leader presented a campaign or an agenda that passed this four-point test: centrist, inclusivist, positive, aspirational.

If the answer is Mayawati and BSP, I rest my case.

In the second part of my Limousine Liberals’ diary from the Uttar Pradesh campaign, I had concluded by saying there is change, and it is acquiring a momentum that will redefine our political landscape in a way that we move away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration (Common Maximum Programme). In the course of the same, somewhat wishful theorising, I had confessed that I see this change but it’s not time yet to say QED.

But when Brahmins and Banias and large sections of Muslims join hands with Dalits, in so unambiguous a manner, it’s perhaps time to say just that, QED. The politics of grievance is yielding to the politics of aspiration. And when that happens, even in the Hindi heartland, you know that it signals a real possibility that we may be finally turning the clock back on the politics of mandal and kamandal.

sg@expressindia.com