You cannot paint over it. The Congress was decimated by the BJP which is led by the controversial but increasingly high profile Narendra Modi, like it or not. He is the flavour. The rest of it is semantics. Whether it was an anti-incumbent defeat or a call for change or a warning flare to the Congress for next year’s general election, the fact is the country was sick to its guts of the scandal and the corruption and the grandstanding which went with it.

There is also a rage over the inequality of Indian justice. One man gets a second trial 10 years later. Another is freed on parole because his sister is not well. Thousands of undertrials, meanwhile, wait years to get their day in court and are not even charged as they sit jammed like sardines behind bars.
And while we are on the subject, why do the cops in Goa need 10 days to keep Tarun Tejpal in custody? What can he tell them that’s new after the first half hour of his ‘cooperative’ disclosure about the elevator tryst? Get on with it; you don’t need a 10-day inquiry.

Back to politics. Ironically, the next year will be test for the BJP’s credibility because if they fall at the starting gate the Congress could take advantage of their ineptitude. It has happened before.

If there is one positive that everyone can carry it is the system works, shoddy, clumsy, yet efficient. Power was handed over without violence. The defeated concede in the greatest traditions and the winners now hold the reins. Red powder not gunpowder. That's okay by me.

Not just that but over 60 years down the road Indians voted, the highest ever in Delhi and the rich and the famous, the pundits of the drawing room came out and did their bit. It was not a poor man’s election and yet, in delightful counterpoint the Aam Aadmi Party picked up a great deal of slack and made its mark like no third party has ever done. Ergo, both sides of the social coin were covered.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son, party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, yesterday said they accepted the party's defeat in the assembly elections in four states and promised to take all necessary action to rectify its mistakes and its way of functioning. Guys, the horse has gone, slam the stable door as hard as you like!