President’s rule has been lifted in Karnataka and the month-long political stalemate is broken. Another BJP-JDS government is poised to take charge, with a BJP chief minister this time. For the BJP this is a first — an intimate tryst with power south of the Vindhyas. A happy day, then, for the saffron party and for the people of Karnataka now that the threat of another election no longer looms? At the risk of sounding terribly out of sorts with the mood of this festive day, the answer is: not quite. While the decision of the Union cabinet to revoke President’s rule is correct, and a constitutional crisis has been wisely averted, Karnataka’s political crisis has not withered away.

Karnataka’s new government will be saddled with the old infirmities. It must be haunted by memories of vicious mudslinging between the coalition partners after the Kumaraswamy government fell on October 9, and the terrible depletion of trust between the JDS and BJP that it signified. The B.S. Yediyurappa government will also have to mind the 12-point MoU that H.D. Deve Gowda sent BJP president Rajnath Singh a few days ago — a set of do’s and don’ts that is innocent of any principles of coalitional commitment and collective responsibility and merely reinforces the mercenary nature of the pact between the two parties. It stipulates the way in which the petty spoils — postings and promotions — are to be distributed and divided. It carefully leaves open the possibility of one partner — read JDS — pulling out of the coalition, at any time, if things don’t go according to its taste. In other words, the new government starts on a remarkably low cache of trust and hope in a shared future.

It must be hoped that the Yediyurappa government can survive these odds. For the sake of the people of Karnataka, it must do more than that. It must pull itself together and deliver. The writing on the wall is clear. In these demanding times, governance failure will not be forgiven at the hustings.