But it remains to be seen if Mulayam’s revised poll calculus will pay. For one, the Lodh vote is no monolith in UP. Also, politics is seldom about the intended consequences, anyway.

Take Mayawati’s much-feted “rainbow coalition” in UP, arguably one of the most spectacular instances of the politics of unintended consequences. It is true that having sensed the necessity of the “plus vote” in UP, the BSP deliberately pitched a wider tent in the run-up to the 2007 polls. It held “bhaichara sammelans”, blunted and redrafted its slogans, doled out tickets and the promise of enhanced representation to members of other castes and communities, especially Brahmins. But it is also true that if there is something on which voters in Lucknow agree with those in Sitapur and in Hamirpur at the other end, it is this: The 2007 vote was not so much a mandate for Mayawati’s social engineering as much as a verdict against the flagrantly unpopular Mulayam regime.

It was to root out the SP that voters across castes, mostly from the poor among them, banded together behind the BSP. Already, two years later, the fragility of that coming together is showing. In this election, that grand coalition is being undone by the caste prejudice that had only been briefly relegated in 2007 by the more urgent political imperative to oust the SP.

But it is also being strained by the Mayawati government’s terrible wasting of its own opportunity to transform her unprecedented electoral coalition into an enduring social alliance. In its two years in power, the BSP regime is seen to have delivered little other than a broad firmness on conspicuous law and order violations. What has been showcased, instead, is its magnificent obsession with building memorials in Lucknow, its frank patronage of friends and family, and of criminals formerly in the SP. Most of all, the Mayawati government is widely seen to be as corrupt as Mulayam’s regime was seen to be lumpenised.

... contd.