THERE’S a storm in a teacup that taken at a flood leads on to the prime minister-ship of India. No one, not even his numerous detractors, should begrudge Narendra Modi the quality of his success.

Throughout the world, political pundits and social savants have made much of his almost perpendicular rise to power, from tea boy to teapot politics.

It has been spectacular, perhaps unprecedented in the annals of democracy. The largest electorate in history has given its collective decision, without the mayhem that Western observers cross continents to audit. It has voted for the party it wants and the policies it espouses; equally unequivocally, it has signified which parties it does not want.

In essence, the BJP stands today where the Congress Party once did, except that it has chosen to occupy Rama’s sandals just as the Congress once shuffled about in Mahatma Gandhi’s leather chappals.

Congress has not yet petrified into a fossil.

The BJP has come a long way over the past 30 years. In 1984, it secured only two seats in the Lok Sabha; today, it has 280 more. This could not have been possible without the perseverance of its leadership, especially former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. He and other members of the old guard (notably L.K. Advani) have been relegated to icon-hood. Like Catholic saints, they should expect to receive their homage from afar.

For Congress, this election has been as traumatic as November 1963 was for the Kennedy dynasty. On Nov 22, someone in New York rushed into a bar and shouted: “The president’s been shot!” At which one person replied: “Yes, but is he dead?”

The Congress Party has been effectively buried by the BJP. It has only 44 seats, a presence of less than 10pc of the Lok Sabha. Buried, but some might ask, is it dead?

The enduring truth is that the Indian National Congress has been in existence too long for it to become extinct after just one round of elections. It may be a huge political pachyderm but it has not yet petrified into a fossil. It will continue to survive, an opposition without conviction, a lumbering elephant without tusks.

The shape and identity the Congress party adopts following this electoral defeat will depend upon how quickly it can disassociate itself from Rahul Gandhi and his fellow pall-bearers.

Of the two sons of his grandmother Mrs Indira Gandhi, Rahul inherited his father’s physical DNA but the political genes of his uncle Sanjay. The condescension he demonstrated to those whom he led was at its worst when he neglected for whatever reason — and he must have had a good one — to attend the farewell dinner given for the outgoing prime minister of his own party.

Manmohan Singh endured that final slight with the same stoic silence as he had previous humiliations at the hands of his employers. Rahul’s haughtiness was reminiscent of that famous cartoon ‘Dropping the Pilot’ by Sir John Tenniel (Punch, March 1890) that showed the ageing Chancellor von Bismarck being off-loaded from the ship of state by the younger, arrogant and impetuous Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

While Manmohan Singh has declared that his 10-year prime minister-ship is “an open book”, it is unlikely that he will do the Sanjaya Baru on himself. His dignified reticence was once his greatest virtue; to his critics, it is now his unforgivable vice. He can take comfort from the fact that few technocrats have survived for so long on what Benjamin Disraeli once described as “the top of the greasy pole”.

On many occasions, Manmohan Singh had expressed a desire to revisit his birth village of Gah (now in Pakistan). That may at last be possible, now that the gilded manacles of his official position have been removed. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif would probably welcome such a trip, perhaps more than he might welcome a visit (his diplomatic invitation notwithstanding) from Mr Modi and BJP hardliners who have not forgotten Lahore, Kargil or Agra.

Will the new BJP government have any time for Pakistan, for Bangladesh or for Jammu & Kashmir? Only a determined optimist will see a silver lining in the swirling cloud of saffron. When it comes to fence-mending, though, the United States is already ahead of Pakistan in the queue. President Barack Obama’s telephone call to Modi was more than a diplomatic courtesy; it was an act of political contrition.

Not far from the White House, in an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, a poster is on display showing Uncle Sam embracing a turbaned Sikh, in apology after the murder of a sardar mistaken for a Muslim after 9/11. That poster needs to be updated, now that Uncle Sam has embraced Modi.

The writer is an author and art historian.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2014