The prevailing sentiment among the intelligentsia ... is ... nobody expected the BJP government's performance to be quite so disappointing. Yes, there were always concerns about the Sangh Parivar's lunatic fringe, but nobody believed that the quality of governance itself would be so poor.

Perhaps this sentiment is not unjustified. And perhaps the Central Government has failed to live up to expectations. But ... were the chattering classes wrong in having these expectations to begin with? ..

The failures of the Delhi Govt. should have taught us what to expect when the BJP moved into South Block ... Take the squabbles that now dominate the political centre-stage. You think they are only because of Jayalalitha? Not true. We had them in Delhi long before the AIADMK aligned with the BJP and even before K.L. Sharma went on a banana diet ... Take the Central Government's failure to understand how the international community works which has led to the foreign policy debacle in the wake of  Pokhran. There too, the Delhi government was  everal years ahead. When a plague epidemic broke out in Surat, the State Government ... promptly pressed the panic button, closed all schools and shut all cinema halls .. Consequently, the world isolated India ...

What about the Union Government's tendency to make rash promises it can't keep? Well, we've had that in Delhi too. When the power situation deteriorated. Sahib Singh Verma announced that things would improve in 48 hours. In fact, they got worse and have continued to do so .... The failure of the DVB is a metaphor for the failure of the State Government. And that in its turn is a symbol of the failure of the BJP as an instrument of governance ... To turn one of Asia's most beautiful capitals into an area of darkness is an act of breathtaking incompetence. And yet nobody in the BJP ... seems to care. They are too busy picnicking in Lodhi Garden.                                                                                   (Source: The Hindustan Times, 10 July, 1998)