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.

Take governance, for example. While voters were split along party and caste lines about whether Mulayam Singh Yadav’s government should get another chance, there was shared ground on assessing the strengths and weaknesses of various parties: the SP was considered better on development and on looking after the interests of the farmers, while the BSP was considered better on general welfare, reduction of corruption and law and order. People did see this issue through the spectacles of caste, but there is a common sense that cuts across the caste divide. In this sense, it was a positive verdict — from within a limited menu, as always — with serious expectations.

The same applies to development. Those looking for ‘development’ in the voters’ behaviour often take a very narrow definition of development: economic growth, investment-friendly climate and infrastructure. This clearly did not mean much to the UP voters. They did understand the other meaning of development — bijli, sadak, paani — and they thought the SP was the best party for development in this sense, but this consideration did not change their vote in a decisive way.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that economic conditions did not make a difference. When the UP voters were asked to spell out the principal consideration for voting, the leading choices were in terms of economic conditions: price rise (a euphemism for poverty), unemployment, conditions of farmers and of course development in the sense of bijli-sadak-paani. Besides the economic condition, they mentioned corruption and law and order.

Issues other than caste did matter. And so did caste. The challenge of interpreting the mandate in UP is not to ask whether it was caste or issues but to see the exact manner in which the two combined to produce a historic verdict. That is what the voters themselves seem to be saying. When quizzed directly about it, only 18 per cent said caste was important to their voting decision, 39 per cent said caste did not matter at all, 14 per cent said both of these mattered and 28 per cent said they had no opinion.

Caste is undoubtedly the building block of electoral politics. This is as much true of the most literate electorate of Kerala as it is of voters in UP. People think about their everyday concerns and livelihood matters in and through caste. More importantly, caste channels political information and provides a filter to evaluate that information. So, caste matters to the way we think and act even when we are not conscious of it. This applies as much to metropolitan intellectuals as to illiterate voters in UP.

But the fact that caste is a building block does not mean that the building has to have a casteist architecture. If the mandate of UP has an ideological element, it is not the ideology of casteism. Ironically, it is precisely through a very complex caste calculus that the voters of UP may have sent a message of what Ambedkar called ‘Annihilation of Caste’. If you don’t believe it, just consider this number: on a conservative estimate, at least 7 million non-dalits upper caste voters of UP turned out to vote for a party that their forefathers would have found untouchable, politically and otherwise. Democratic politics has a way of bringing about social revolutions through quotidian and petty games of personal interests and ambitions.