We have seen that the state politics of UP has been mostly governed by caste. The real competition lies between BJP, SP and BSP. The general alignments of the politics were dalits with BSP, yadavs and muslims with SP and the upper caste with BJP. This version of identity politics led to fragmentation of political space and made it virtually impossible for any party to rule the state alone.
However in todays context, caste-party alignments are either gone or are insufficient to explain parties performances. There are reasons why we should look beyond caste.
1. Firsty, nearly 40% of UPs castes have never sent a single representative to the assembly.
2. Lokniti/ csds survey data shows us only a few groups vote cohesively for specific parties. They are mostly jatavs and yadavs. They have their individual strength and parties. Others split their vote between parties.
3. Thirdly, nurturing a core support base on basis of caste is necessary but not sufficient. We see, jatavs only representd 13% of total population. Brahmins and yadavs are 9.2 and 8.7 % respectively. They also don’t vote unanimously for the same party.
4.There has been a growing differentiation of caste voting along class lines. For eg. The upper class of yadavs mostly vote for BJP.

5. 2014 elections shows how social and religious polarisation can be used to fragment political space, to build majority seats out of minorities of votes.

Thus, it is very certain that caste dosent play a major role in determining the ruling party. And most of the educated class nowadys have lifted up from the caste based politics and they have realised that it is the development agendas that are going to do them good and nothing can be achieved by fighting on caste basis. People nowadays demand development and votes for the manifesto guranteeing them the same. They are more inclined towards development oriented governments. However it is very certain that  caste still determines the ticket distribution, which inturn shapes the representation caste groups have in assembly. The successful parties are those who can in addition to this attract floating voters by other means than identity politics. What elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal signifies is that  votes are ploarised towards parties who provide tangible benefits to voters across caste division. More and more state governments have returned to power precisely because of their ability to effectively distribute public goods while transcending caste division. So there is this possibility that the same scenario happens in UP elections as well and party which does the best will come to power.