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.