What I am questioning is anyone's ability to have direct contact sith more than a tiny fraction of the voters of Uttar Pradesh. So, then, do people propagate their impressions by word of mouth? Why don't people trust what they hear on the radio or seeon TV or read on the papers? How many people get their political information from the radio, TV, or press? Do people vote as they are told by community leaders? Are there patron/client relations at play, especially in rural areas? How does caste influence things? For instance, there are the following bits in the text you quote:

In UP, Mayawati, as everyone knows and as the successive elections results have proved, has undisputed hold over the Dalit votes.

...

Mayawati is so confident about the loyalty of her 'vote bank' that in public meetings she has accepted that she takes money from Thakur-Brahmin candidates to run her party. In the last elections in UP in 2002, she gave a big chunk of the BSP tickets to Thakurs. But Thakurs who got elected on BSP tickets were uncomfortable with 'Dalit politcs' and they deserted her and her party.

...

For the first time, she has given tickets to 89 Brahmins. This may seem audacious. It is indeed unprecedented in the caste-ridden society where social prejudices and identities are at the very core of political action-reactions.

...

She doesn't care for niceties and sophistication. She is openly contemptuous of middle class sensitivities over issues like corruption.

Patron/client, caste and religious relations seem to play a huge role which repels the western "liberal democracy" sensitivity. Now, I think to some extent there is a mythology of "clean politics" in "liberal democracies" which hides the fact that patronage is alive and kicking in the business world and among the elite and, as long as that is kept hidden from the middle class, the "fair play" mythology can be used to defuse the threat of the middle and low classes organising. Look at the lack of "shock" over Sarkozy's cozy relations with the largest capitalists in France. However, clientelism will be used by the mass media under the control of the elite to discredit candidates from the left.

I hope that makes sense.

Bush is a symptom, not the disease.