First accept the fact: You've lost it in the House, now it is not for you, even if you are the re-elected frontman of the party, to regain it all through arithmetic, realise that your field is larger than Delhi, that your field is the maidan of the people. He can afford to do that at a time when the winners of April 17 are losing so badly before the nation's eyes.

Vajpayee can afford to sit back and watch the winners playing out the script of government-formation in a maidan littered with individual egos and popular scorn. The script only magnifies his own victimhood. It also gives him and his party an opportunity to take the moral ground, which is high above the maidan. This is an opportunity to make the best use of the winners' worst politics. To do that,he should make sure that his politics at this juncture is different from, say, Surjeet's.

Can he do that, or can his party do that? For this maidan-buoyancy cannot be seen in isolation. The BJP has a history of turning the historical into the banal. It happened 13 months ago when the party failed to read the fineprints of the mandate: a right turn in the polity. But the party and its managers handled it as if it were just a question of succession, just another coalition government. Elsewhere in the world, there were New Democrats and New Labour and the romance associated with them, but in Delhi the coronation looked so tired an affair. Today the fantasy of one woman and the second thoughts of another have given the BJP and its leader another moment to be different, to be with the people. Stake your claim, yes, in the court of the people, not in Rashtrapati Bhawan. Managing the defeat is not like running a coalition government. It requires statesmanship and vision.