We know the outcome, we have at last a clear verdict, but do we have a mandate here? This big question begs an answer of any post-mortem of the UP polls. After all, this election in UP was for many a contest between an anxiety and a hope: an anxiety that the voters will remain trapped in caste polarities that refuse to yield a stable and meaningful government and a hope that this time issues and ideologies, and considerations like governance and development, may matter in a way they have not in the past two decades.

The trouble, of course, is that there is no simple way of finding out what the mandate is. While the election outcomes are announced by the returning officers and the overall verdict by the TV anchors, the election mandate can only be accessed through interpretation, by an endless peeling of the trends and patterns hidden in the outcomes.

Appearances can be deceptive. There is much in this verdict in UP that gives the impression that there was not much of a mandate this time. It was the same old game of caste politics with Mayawati building a better caste coalition than others have done in the recent elections. If there was any mandate, it was a negative mandate on Mulayam Singh Yadav’s misrule.

A closer reading of the electoral outcomes and the findings of the Indian Express—CNN-IBN—CSDS post-poll survey of 11321 respondents suggests a different interpretation. The clear political verdict this time was not just an artifact of the seats-votes skew or the mechanics of caste coalition. If we look carefully, we find here traces of a mandate. Issues and ideologies did make a difference, and so did development and governance. It is just that they did not do so in the way we expect them to.

... contd.