New Delhi, Feb. 10: A year after he "ran away" after a mere 49 days in office and less than nine months after he faced an ignominious defeat in the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat, Arvind Kejriwal pulled off an absolute - or shall we say AAPsolute - miracle today.

Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won an incredible 67 of the 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly after grounding the Indian National Congress to dust and delivering a body blow to the hitherto "invincible" Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine that resounded far beyond the confines of India's national capital.

In the light of the spirited campaign by the AAP, whose army of volunteers worked tirelessly over the last few months to regain the support it had got from Delhi's working and middle classes on its debut outing in December 2013, almost every pollster had predicted the party's victory.

But the staggering scale of the AAP's triumph exceeded the wildest estimations, and supporters and adversaries alike were left scrambling to work out its arithmetic and chemistry.

The arithmetic is easy. The biggest loser today, statistically speaking, is Sonia Gandhi and her tattered Grand Old Party. After ruling Delhi with aplomb for three consecutive terms, the Congress was routed in December 2013, winning just eight seats and around 25 per cent of the popular vote. In the Lok Sabha elections that followed in May 2014, the Congress vote share dipped to 15 per cent. That losing streak only intensified this time round with the Congress getting only 10 per cent of the popular vote and scoring a duck.

Almost the entire Congress vote shifted to the AAP - the principal reason why the new kid on the block could secure 54 per cent of the popular vote, one of the highest ever in the history of Indian elections.

The BJP can take heart from the fact that its vote share fell by a mere one per cent from December 2013 to now. BJP leaders have been quick to seize on this statistic to claim that it is the decimation of the Congress and other smaller secular parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party that has given the AAP such a handsome win.

Apart from blaming the local Delhi leadership and the "wrong choice" of Kiran Bedi as the last-minute chief ministerial candidate, the Congress's abysmal performance, they insist, is the biggest reason for the BJP's own drubbing and the paltry tally of three seats.

But politics is much more than cold facts and dry statistics. It is about perceptions and context and chemistry. As far as these go, the BJP's defeat today overshadows by far the Congress's drubbing. For one, the Congress has been on a downward spiral in election after election for so long now that its decimation seems staler than day-before-yesterday's headlines. In Delhi, it dipped from eight (December 2013) to nil (May 2014) to nil again (February 2015.)

The BJP's trajectory is the exact opposite. It has been on a winning spree across the country, and the Narendra Modi wave - the much famed TSUNAMO, remember - promised to change the political landscape for a long time to come. In December 2013, even under the "uncharismatic" leadership of Harsh Vardhan, the BJP managed to emerge the single largest party with 32 seats in the Delhi Assembly.

In the Lok Sabha elections, the Namo wave swept through the city, giving the BJP all seven Lok Sabha seats (and, extrapolated, as many as 60 Assembly segments.)

That is why the BJP's precipitous decline from 32 to three seats in Delhi (with a detour of 60 in between) cannot gloss over the "mere 1 per cent decline in vote share" logic.

The drubbing is all the more significant because it is the first election that the BJP has comprehensively lost since Narendra Modi rampaged to power eight-odd months ago.

BJP leaders today, much like their Congress counterparts, were at pains to shield their supreme leader from any blame. But for the denizens of Delhi, and indeed for the BJP as well, this election was fought under the towering persona and prowess of Narendra Modi.

Every poster and hoarding, every radio jingle and newspaper advertisement projected the Prime Minister with the tag line " Chalo Chalen Modi ke Saath" (Let us advance with Modi), and Modi himself exhorted the people to vote for a stable BJP government because "Delhi is India" and the "world is watching this election".

In the event, the national capital voted overwhelmingly for a stable government, but Modi's appeal appears to have been counter-productive. During the Lok Sabha election, the "Modi factor" was the BJP's trump card and helped the party pull way above its weight - it secured 47 per cent of the vote, 13 per cent more than it had in the Assembly polls just six months before.

True, the dynamics of Lok Sabha and Assembly elections are not strictly comparable. Yet, it is rare for a party to have such a poor follow-up in an Assembly election just eight months after a spectacular general election victory. And when the Assembly election takes place in the very heart of the nation's seat of power, the political message echoes around the country that much more loudly.

A political message is never written in black and white; it is a medley of murmurs and whispers, of subtle nods and sly winks, of half-forgotten memories and new stratagems.

The word has already got around that Modi and his formidable party and parivar are no longer as unbeatable as they seemed to be just a day ago; that in India you can never take the people for granted; that the promise of " achchhe din" is beginning to wear thin; that the ruling party of a diverse nation such as India cannot be or be seen to be hostile or uncaring towards its many minorities; that the rousing rhetoric of a skilled campaigner begins to sound like bombast when it is mouthed by an elected Prime Minister; that a chief ministerial candidate cannot be foisted on a local leadership; that collective leadership and grassroots mobilisation cannot be sacrificed at the altar of a supreme leader....

But perhaps the biggest, and most ironical, lesson that Messrs Modi and Shah have learned today is that their dream of a "Congress- mukt Bharat" does not and will not mean a bed of lotuses. The Delhi results have shown that if the Congress is decimated, the BJP is not the automatic beneficiary. The BJP, in fact, did not get even a fraction of the erstwhile Congress vote - it went wholesale to the AAP.

No wonder, the Delhi result has put new life into a range of "non-Congress, non-BJP" forces - ranging from the CPM to the Trinamul Congress, from the Shiv Sena to the Janata Dal (United). And not to forget the quiet satisfaction it has given to a host of BJP leaders who have felt sidelined under the post-May 2014 dispensation.

The BJP, certainly, remains the country's biggest national party and Modi's popularity remains high - Delhi has dented it a little today, but not damaged it as such. But the BJP cannot hope to acquire an "umbrella" party status the Congress enjoyed for so many decades unless it sheds its angularities and expands its social base; and unless it ensures that the Opposition is divided.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the BJP managed to win 74 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats with just one-third of the popular vote because it faced a disunited Opposition. But in Delhi, where the AAP garnered all the "Opposition" votes, the BJP faced a rout.

Delhi may not get replicated elsewhere immediately. But it has put new life into forces opposed to the BJP and the Sangh parivar and underlined that even if the Congress remains in coma, new challengers can emerge to checkmate arrogance and complacency. The AAP's victory is both a wake-up call and a warning.