Six months ago the conventional wisdom was that Mayawati would sweep back to power in Uttar Pradesh, albeit in a coalition rather than with absolute majority. Then the spin doctors, expert commentators and psephologists got going and the jumble of punditry in the months preceding the elections led many to lose sight of the wood for the trees.

But what happened in UP last week, and Bihar last year, signifies a bigger trend than just the anti-incumbency typical of many Indian elections. To borrow a phrase from the lexicon of global business, Indian politics is smack in the middle of an inflection point, a term used by Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of microchip behemoth Intel, to describe momentous occasions when the underlying fundamentals give way to a new paradigm.

While caste has always been a big part of our politics, the apogee of caste-based vote banks was the decade from 1989 to 1999. That was when, following an earlier inflection point (Mandal), parties based exclusively on caste stormed the bastilles of various states and forced a change at the Centre. Along with the rise of regionalism, this wave saw one-party rule give way to coalition government in Delhi.

From the 2000 general elections, however, it should have been obvious to anyone not rigidly wedded to the ’90s-era caste combination arithmetic that such political strategies had plateaued. By the 2002 UP elections, the BSP had already moved on from pure Dalit enfranchisement politics to a strategy of broad-basing by putting up a number of upper caste candidates. And what has wrong-footed so many pundits in 2007 (pun intended) is really only the next logical step of that strategy: a clearly enunciated pre-poll arrangement of broad-basing and a significant number of upper caste and other non-dalit candidates.

... contd.