Ms Mayawati has pulled off what most pundits and pollsters thought she would never be able to do: win an unambiguous majority in Uttar Pradesh’s 403-strong Assembly. The number of seats she won (206) greatly surpasses the 115-to-168 range that most opinion polls forecast for her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Her feat is all the more impressive because she fought against seemingly insuperable odds, as a single woman and a Dalit in one of India’s most socially backward and conservative states. Her sole political instrument was the BSP, with its relatively small Dalit core and without the advantages of experience, visibility, social acceptability and favourable media coverage which its rivals possess.

Ms Mayawati has broken UP’s decades-old political “impasse”, under which the state seemed destined to have a series of hung Assemblies as different social groups voted according to their caste/community affiliation to achieve political self-representation, thus leading to no clear majority for any party. The last time this impasse was broken was in 1991, when the Bharatiya Janata Party rode the anti-Babri mosque mobilisation wave. But this was a sort-lived affair.

Ms Mayawati has emerged as the tallest leader of Indian Dalits after Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, far surpassing the stature of her mentor, the late Kanshi Ram, and Babu Jagjivan Ram, leave alone various leaders of the notoriously faction-ridden Republican Party. Indeed, no Dalit leader has enjoyed the spectacular electoral success that she has achieved by dint of hard-nosed strategising for a new form of “social engineering”, and through extraordinarily energetic and focused campaigning.

The key to the BSP’s success lies in an impressive increase in its vote-share from 23.2 percent to 30.5 percent between 2002 and now—a remarkable achievement thanks to its garnering of non-Dalit votes across the board and across all the regions of UP. It fielded as many as 139 upper-caste candidates, 86 of them Brahmins. But this couldn’t have translated into votes without the relentless grassroots bhaichara (social amity) campaigns by the party’s charged cadres. The most significant of these was the Brahmin jodo abhiyan.

One reason for this alliance of strange bedfellows is that both the Dalits and the Brahmins feel squeezed by the rise of the OBCs. But, as we see below, that couldn’t have been the main reason. Brahmins were drawn to the BSP and voted for it while accepting the primacy of its social-political agenda.

The BSP now boasts of the largest number of Brahmin MLAs (34) in any party. It also commands the affiliation of the largest number of Thakurs (19), higher than the Samajwadi Party’s or the BJP’s. However, no less important were the BSP’s gains among the OBCs (51 MLAs, including 4 Yadavs)—compared to the quintessentially OBC SP’s 27 MLAs. It drew strong support from the Most Backward Classes (MBCs). The more credible exit polls show that the BSP enjoyed an 8 percent vote-swing among the Brahmins.

With a 6 percent vote-swing among Muslims, who account for 18 percent of UP’s population, the BSP decisively breached the SP’s minority stronghold. Of the 62 constituencies where Muslims account for more than 20 percent of the population, the BSP improved its tally from 10 to 22. The SP’s tally fell from 24 to 13. Significantly, most of the BSP’s 26 Muslim MLAs come from the poorer ajlaf communities. By contrast, most of the SP’s 16 Muslim MLAs are from upper-class ashraf groups.

This, like the MBCs’ gravitation towards the BSP, bears testimony to its emergence as the chosen party of all subaltern groups too, as well as significant sections of the upper castes.

It’s tempting to argue that the BSP’s new sarvajan coalition (comprising all social groups) is a replica of the Congress’s traditional “winning coalition” of the 1950s and 1960s, comprising the upper castes, Muslims and Dalits, and that this represents the BSP’s “Congressisation”, with a middle-of-the-road, inclusive, centrist appeal. But this would be a grave error.

Many of these non-Dalit groups certainly voted for the BSP, but on terms set by its Dalit-centred agenda. Unlike the Congress of the past, which distributed patronage to different groups, the BSP’s success lay in direct appeals to their ethnic identity, subordinated to a plebeian, Dalit-dominated platform.

It’s a tribute to the BSP’s growing stature and the acceptance of the inevitable centrality of its subaltern appeal that UP’s upper castes voted for it. The key here lies in two phenomena: the BSP’s steady, rapid rise over two decades, and the BJP’s erosion. Ever since the BSP was formed in 1984, it has ceaselessly expanded its vote and seat-share—from 9.4 percent and 11 seats in 1989, to 9.4 percent and 13 seats in 1991, to 11.1 percent and 67 in 1993, to 19.6 percent and 67 seats in 1996, and from 23.1 percent and 98 seats in 2002. Each of the three times the BSP allied with the BJP, it expanded its base at the latter’s expense.

The results are a major blow to the SP (down from 143 to 98 seats), the Congress (25 to 22) and the BJP (from 88 to just 50). There’s a difference, though. The SP’s vote-share has marginally increased, but its distribution has become more adverse.

The Congress suffered a tiny one-half percentage point decrease in votes—despite a high-profile campaign by Mr Rahul Gandhi. His road-shows attracted big, curious audiences. But the Congress represented no specific social bloc and didn’t project a credible alternative. It kept talking about an intangible “Hindustani” identity, ignoring the emancipatory potential of caste self-assertion in some circumstances.

The election’s biggest loser is indisputably the BJP. It suffered a 3 percent-plus decline in its vote-share. And it forfeited its advantages, rooted in the return of Mr Kalyan Singh to its fold, and an alliance with the Kurmi-dominated Apna Dal. The BJP sustained loses in all the regions. In 2002, the BJP and its allies were at the Number 1 or Number spots in 238 seats. This time, figure has fallen to just 124. The BJP’s own No. 1 & No. 2 spots have fallen from 197 to 120. Its allies’ vote-share declined from 6.6 to just 1.4 percent.

Evidently, the BJP’s recent electoral successes in Delhi, Uttarakhand and Punjab were shallow and transient. The BJP ran a dirty and divisive campaign in UP, calculated to raise the communal temperature through inflammatory material and a CD that has been roundly condemned by the Election Commission. It focused on “minority appeasement”—the Sachar Committee, the Mohammed Afzal hanging case, etc.

The BJP’s strategy miserably failed. The tallest of its leaders, including Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, a quintessentially Brahmin leader, couldn’t rescue it from humiliation in his home state. Nor could Mr Murli Manohar Joshi and Rajnath Singh ensure state president Kesri Nath Tripathi’s victory in Allahabad.

The BJP has now been reduced in UP to its pre-Ayodhya avatar—a Number 3 or 4 largely urban party in a predominantly rural state. Half its seats have come from large cities like Lucknow, Varanasi, Agra, Allahabad, Meerut, Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Ghaziabad, Muzzafarnagar, Bareilly and Moradabad.

What do the results imply for the BSP, for UP, and for Indian politics? The BSP has gained handsomely in national stature. But it faces major challenges in UP—in terms of delivering goods to its constituency, in particular, the Dalits. This it can only do through serious social reform, including land reform, and by putting the redistribution agenda right on top while concentrating on law-and-order and responsible governance. It should know that a major source of its success lay in popular disgust with the goonda raj that thrived under the SP. It will be judged severely on law-and-order. The Dalits expect the BSP to go beyond tokenism. They want substantive empowerment through land reform, education and employment.

This is the best opportunity for UP to return to the agenda of development with distributive justice—from which the state has retreated, especially thanks to the SP’s obsession with cronyism, its links with shady businessmen, and its contempt for social justice issues.

The BSP’s victory will influence the complexion of Indian politics—not least because it places the issue of social equity and redistribtutive justice on the agenda amidst a dangerously misplaced euphoria over (unbalanced) growth. The SP’s defeat will put the idea of a Third Front on the backburner for some time. The CPM lost heavily because of its tacit alliance with the SP. It must learn a lesson from this.

The BSP may or may not be able to replicate its UP success in other states. But it can look forward to spreading its influence in many states, including Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. It can best capitalise on these gains if it adopts a Left-of-Centre programme with an emphasis on radical reform. That’s the best way of building on the Ambedkar legacy.