Opinion | How Almost Everyone Failed To Read The Tea Leaves In Uttar Pradesh

Let's try to understand the main takeaway of this election: how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost Uttar Pradesh and thereby its sole Lok Sabha majority.

Uttar Pradesh swung the national verdict, and the fact is that nobody anticipated that, let alone predict it. Nobody stuck her or his neck out and said the Congress-Samajwadi Party (SP) alliance would win more seats than the BJP. Yogendra Yadav's phase-wise election overview and his heartfelt write-ups based on his travels through the Hindi heartland zeroed in on the many factors that resulted in the 19% swing in favour of the Congress-SP alliance in the state, which led to a 9% vote drop for the BJP and 10% for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Yadav was the closest anybody got to sensing the electorate earthquake that, single-handedly,  prevented the BJP from getting a simple majority.

Many would argue that prominent YouTube channels in Hindi, most notably Red Mike, as well as innumerable bloggers, also gave glimpses of the surge in the Congress-SP support. Like that proverbial tale of the blind men and the elephant, many sharp observers correctly felt the many parts of the elephant, but nobody realised that it was an elephant - and a rather big one - they were facing.