The frenzied week between the attack on Mumbai and vote counting in four states and Delhi recalled Kunwar Natwar Singh’s story about Indira Gandhi’s advice when he gave up the foreign service for politics. He was ordering a khadi wardrobe when she told him to acquire a thick skin instead of new clothes.

“The word politician stinks”, Natwar Singh said ruefully in those seven days when India seemed in danger of fracturing along several fault lines. “I am nearing 80 and I do not recall a similar national mood.” He was not the only one. The protests and marches at New Delhi’s India Gate, the singing and the candles, suggested that a profoundly apolitical upper middle class was suddenly trying to reinvent itself as a political force to demolish politics and destroy politicians. That bizarre situation has since been belied by a high voter turnout that highlights a significant divide between India and Bharat. But politicians should not forget the warning of those few days when rattled functionaries across the board displayed little sign of the thick skin Mrs Gandhi recommended.

Text messages reading, “Never mind those who come by boats, worry about those who come up by votes,” accompanied exhortations to boycott the polls. Legislators were “our elected political terrorists.” Posters urged, “Sack the politicians. All of them”. It was recalled that Delhi High Court had dismissed the notion of politicians being national assets that needed protection; that the Special Rangers Group to protect VIPs cost Rs 180 crore while the National Security Guards for the protection of a billion Indians cost only Rs 158 crore.

The irony was that political life hadn’t suddenly degenerated. The scams and scandals, Bihar’s lawlessness, Maharashtra’s bigotry and the absence of effective governance in many regions spoke of long-term decline. We all knew that criminal cases are pending against 102 out of 543 members of parliament. Even the recent elections returned a goodly number of members of the legislative assembly (especially in Delhi) charged with criminal offences. Even more ironically, the event that turned public wrath against politicians was not really a political failure. It was a failure of the administration, intelligence, and military and para-military forces. Neither the “civil war” (Arun Jaitley’s term) between 19 security agencies nor Admiral Sureesh Mehta’s extraordinary plea of not receiving “actionable information” could be laid at the politician’s door.

Politicians are a necessary evil. Just as democracy may not be the ideal system of governance but is better than all the others, politicians are not the ideal instruments of governance but are better than, say, army generals. “Who will govern the country if not politicians?” asked K.P. Unnikrishnan, who was surface transport and communications minister under V.P. Singh. In their distress, politicians and media found themselves in the same boat, though squabbling with each other. Kamal Nath accused the media of “demeaning democracy” in a country that is proud of 450,000 elected representatives from panchayat to parliament. Jaswant Singh cited Britain’s Communications Act of 2003 to call for “a new code for the media during national emergencies.” The media are a separate topic that must be left to another discussion. What matters here is that any kind of representative government — democracy if you like — is inconceivable without politicians. It must also be acknowledged, as Aamir Khan, the actor, says, that our politicians have not come “from Jupiter or Mars, they are one of us, from our very own society, selected by us through a democratic process.” If they are lazy, greedy or grasping, it is because, as they say, “we are also like that only”.

Many people thought Mumbai sounded the death-knell if not of democracy, then certainly of the Congress and Manmohan Singh’s government. The rationale was that people would blame those hideous 62 hours on the system and those who operate it. Three ministerial heads rolled and rightly so; hypocritical gestures by self-seeking publicists like Narendra Modi and V.S. Achuthanandan were also rightly rebuffed. But we did not witness any wholesale rejection of politics in the five states that went to the polls. Nor of the Congress. The results confirmed the truth of the old saying that the more things change, the more they are the same. Indians would rather trust their destiny to proven systems and tried leaders. Most were not interested in L.K. Advani’s efforts to politicize terror.

The gulf between urban, English-speaking, educated and computer savvy India and rustic, vernacular-speaking Bharat yawned wider than ever. Anger and anguish when elitist bastions of privilege — Mumbai’s Taj and Oberoi hotels to which Bharat has no entrée — were devastated manifested itself in a surge of sophisticated but somewhat deracine candle-light processions and mass singing of that American civil rights movement anthem, “We shall overcome.” The India Gate demonstration bore out the Bharatiya Janata Party functionary who spoke of protesters in lipstick and powder. In contrast, the 68 per cent turnout in Rajasthan and nearly 60 per cent in a Delhi that traditionally has little time for politics showed that Bharat has not rejected the democratic structure. Not only was there no bitter backlash against politicians, but the 65 per cent vote in the capital’s congested Mangolpuri shantytown, a reserved constituency, proclaimed that the poor still support the status quo. A mere 46 per cent of fashionable Mehrauli bothered to vote.

The outcome of what is regarded as a dress rehearsal for next year’s parliamentary election, confirms that India is limping back to normalcy. Laced into this verdict, however, is the reminder that the electorate cannot be taken for granted. It was astute, therefore, of Manmohan Singh to sanction a stimulus package, cut the Reserve Bank’s lending rate by 1 per cent, make sure that the benefit is passed on to customers, and promise an umbrella security organization. Pranab Mukherjee’s firmness vis-à-vis Pakistan soothed shattered nerves, while discouraging reckless adventurism that could lead to a nuclear conflagration.

The significance of the outcome is not that Congress, which the pundits wrote off after Mumbai, won three of five states. What matters more is that public participation belied the wild predictions of those who demanded an immediate military take-over, a CEO instead of a PM and another spell of the Emergency rule that made Mrs Gandhi so unpopular. As they also demanded that Pakistan should be bombed, many of India’s 160 million Muslims complained of being snubbed, slighted and treated with suspicion. Passionate declarations of loyalty by iconic personalities like Shah Rukh Khan, decked out in all the finery of a Malay Datuk (knight), and the formation of a Muslim Deshbakht Battalion may not have succeeded as yet in restoring communal confidence.

An election successfully held in the shadow of death and disaster has a meaning beyond immediate governance. It is a vote for continuity, a vote of confidence in the system. But Manmohan Singh must deliver on his promise of 7.5 per cent growth in the rest of 2008-2009. He must maintain communal equilibrium in the teeth of all those closet communalists among middle-class Hindu professionals, and ensure that Islamist terrorists are not again allowed to jeopardize the concept of a secular plural democracy. A final threat to the Indian dream must also be mentioned — the sense of hierarchy that the other day prompted two Communist Party of India (Marxist) MPs to delay a Delhi-Trivandrum flight by four hours and explained Amitabh Bachchan taking a pistol through airport security without the proper papers.

Everyone in India yearns to be an exception to rules that are made for Bharat. Erasing that mentality is the challenge that faces Manmohan Singh in his second coming next year if the democracy that has been saved is to be consolidated. As for the quality of politicians, one cannot do better than quote Shah Rukh Khan again, “If politicians are not doing their job, become one; don’t just indulge in politician-bashing. I appeal to young people to join politics.”