THE 20-km road from Varanasi’s Lal Bahadur Shastri airport into town must provide one of the worst accesses that an “international” port of entry affords to travellers. The constituency is represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and as we drove down this haphazardly assembled collection of potholes a few days ago, I couldn’t resist asking the driver if indeed development was on its way to the ancient city, and whether nine months wasn’t sufficient time to at least fix the road that offered a gateway to a multifaceted tourist destination. His initial response was that things would change now that Mr Modi was in charge, but then he injected a laconic note by adding “perhaps by the time of the next election, this road will have been fixed”.

Varanasi looked as much of a mess in on Republic Day 2015 as it had on Independence Day 2011, when it was not represented by Mr Modi, a point that was underlined the next morning by the unedifying sight of a group of people defecating into the Ganges near the Varuna bridge. Shouldn’t cleaning the Ganges begin with small things like providing toilets? The boatman who was showing us the ghats had a pithy answer. Even as the prime minister hosted President Barack Obama on that day, he said Mr Modi would realise the need to be a local leader once he had finished being a global leader.

Contrary to what party spokespersons would have us believe, it is the absence of Mr Modi’s leadership that has lost his party the election in Delhi. This was as much a mini-referendum on the performance of the central government by those with the best seats in the house and on Mr Modi — the face and campaign head of his party — as it was a battle joined on local issues.

As a distinguished commentator pointed out a few days ago, governance cannot be about slogans alone. And quite frankly, India and especially Delhi with its bird’s-eye view have seen few signs of action to follow up on the reams of rhetoric all of us were bombarded with for well over a year.

In days to come, and BJP apologists have already started to adopt this line, there will be attempts to distance the prime minister from the debacle, just as the Congress had once claimed every triumph as Rahul Gandhi’s and characterised every reverse as someone else’s fault. If the BJP does so, it will be stupid. For unless Mr Modi quickly owns up responsibility for his party’s rout, and does with humility as well as by expressing a resolve to deliver on the promises of governance he came to power with, things can only go downhill for him.

The Delhi outcome will have several fallouts.

The first of these is that Aam Aadmi Party will make a concerted effort to occupy the Opposition space. This space has lain vacant since May 2014, and if Mr Arvind Kejriwal can effectively manage the paradox of being both ruler and principal opponent in Delhi, he might well push politics out of the comfort zone of sloth, corruption and crony capitalism it has wallowed in.

Mr Kejriwal has five years to work with. If he spends the first phase of his stint in power demonstrating that he can provide inclusive growth, it will provide the impetus to a second phase where he might attempt to convince other Indians of his ability to govern, propelled largely by word of Delhi’s many immigrants’ mouths.

Legislative process must be Mr Kejriwal’s first target. Notwithstanding his brute majority, the Delhi assembly must become a forum for debate, introspection and, yes, informed criticism, especially by members of his own party. It must offer a counterpoint to the other legislative body in the city, which sad to say and largely because of the actions of established political parties, has been reduced to a joke. Put in crude, television terms, a live debate in the assembly must aim to attract higher TRPs than one in the Lok Sabha. This will also effectively expose the hollowness and sham of every legislature in the country.

Delhi’s governance must be as transparent as India’s is opaque. As a former activist, no one should realise better than Mr Kejriwal how much more effectively the Right to Information Act can be used as a tool. He must make an open offer to Delhi’ites to use RTI and ensure that his governance is transparent; and he must aid the process by making sure the bureaucracy knows it would be evasive at its own peril. At a time when the central government and many states are working insidiously to dilute RTI provisions, Mr Kejriwal has a chance to show just how different his politics are.

AAP has made many promises, and the best way to fulfil them is by staying focussed. There will be distractions — from other parties wanting to make common cause for short-term goals, from provocations that a BJP government at the Centre will doubtless provide and from the temptation to be drawn into debates — such as the one on Delhi’s policing being controlled by the Centre — that AAP cannot hope to win. These distractions must be shunned if AAP sees a bigger role for itself in national politics.

The BJP, too, must learn its lessons. The first of these must be drawn from the almost quiet sense of satisfaction — perhaps even relief — the party will no doubt note at its extreme discomfiture in Delhi, a feeling not confined to traditional BJP-baiters but even extending to its party cadre. Over the past nine months, there has been increasing unease at the concentration of power in party and government, a feeling articulated in extreme terms by a wag (and a possible AAP supporter) at a south Delhi market where I watched today’s results come in when he said this country couldn’t be run by four Gujaratis. For my benefit, he went on to name the prime minister, the BJP president and two industrialists closely identified with the two of them.

Next, the party will have to aim for development that touches people directly, and not in the indirect fashion postulated by the capitalist model and embraced so often with disastrous consequences by the crony capitalist class. The next important elections for the BJP are in laggard states — Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh — that are less likely to be impressed by reforms and increased FDI than they are by decisions that directly touch their lives. Doubtless, this will — or at least should — have an impact on the budgetary process.

Finally, the BJP and its consortium must realise that the divisive politics of some of its adherents actually puts a lot of people off. As noted in an earlier essay, the prime minister must come clean on his own beliefs and his vision for India; he must either endorse the nutcases in his flock or dismiss them with open contempt. To not do so would tantamount to ignoring the battle lines so clearly drawn by the Delhi result.

—By arrangement with The Statesman-Asia News Network

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2015

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