Nor was it politic for the BJP's central leadership to make such a public exhibition of its difficulties in coming to a decision as it did on Saturday. The accompanying theatrics underline the anxiety of the party and heighten rather than reduce pessimism. BJP leaders also run the risk of alienating a substantial block of Verma's Jat supporters in Delhi as well as in constituencies in Rajasthan.

With Verma checkmating Madanlal Khurana's bid for the gaddi, there will be no real compensatory surge of Punjabi support. To have got rid of Verma despite all this, confirms not how much of a liability he had become as Chief Minister of Delhi but how useful he isas a sacrificial lamb and how urgently one was needed.

With Verma's exit, the BJP hopes, long-suffering Delhiwallahs will forgive and forget power cuts, water shortages and transport breakdowns, murders and increasing lawlessness and sky-high onion prices. All the things, in short, that have worsened living conditions, given the state a bad reputation and provoked even demands for dismissal of the BJP government.

Where Verma could have tried to reduce hardships, he displayed alternately a lack of understanding of people's needs and a lack of ideas. It was no secret that he spent an inordinate amount of energy on the politics of keeping Khurana at bay. Factionalism leading to administrative paralysis and the absence of new policy initiatives have made all of Delhi's woes worse than they need be. The BJP's central leadership must share the blame because it chose to turn a blind eye to Khurana and later Verma's inability to cope with the problems thrown up by rapid population growth in the midst ofdeteriorating infrastructure, problems which have been visible for a long time.

Sushma Swaraj, the reluctant new chief minister, must also hope popular anger has been deflected. She is competent and combative, well-connected in the Sangh Parivar and popular with the media. Miracle-worker she is not. No politician wants to deal with a mess of other people's making. Failure has a way of sticking to one.

She has been given a few weeks to knock heads together and turn things around. As of now she has nothing more sturdy to do all this with than her charisma. She will not be held accountable by the party's powers-that-be if she does not succeed in improving the BJP's image and her seat in the Union cabinet is being held for her. But with all that, she too is being sacrificed on the altar of the party's ambitions. Small wonder that the usually level-headed Swaraj allowed herself to make the rash promise of bringing onion prices down to Rs 5. On the other hand, perhaps she was drawing the BJP leadership'sattention to the fact that a drastic situation calls for drastic measures and much more needs to be done to win over Delhi.