India is emphatic in its "no" to a regime that has let it down with a consistency that can only be matched by its brazenness. For a government headed by a worn-out technocrat still trying desperately for a validation of his besmirched legacy and an alliance led by a fading Lady of Deliverance preparing for another succession rite in the Family, there can't be a warning direr than this. The steepest fall of UPA in the India Today-Nielsen Mood of the Nation poll brings out, in devastating clarity, how the ruling coalition lost India, and more tellingly, how its political as well as administrative leadership has failed to contain the slide. The only consolation for the fallen is the disarray on the other side of the aisle: NDA, though poised to win if elections were held today, has not built on its gains since the last poll. Caught in its existential crisis, BJP has failed to seize the moment and ceded the ground substantially to provincial parties led by leaders whose idea of India is smaller than their satrapies. On the eve of another General Election, Battlefield India, strewn with cracked icons and smashed reputations, tests the patience of one of the world's most unforgiving democracies. India is waiting to be led.This overwhelming absence of the leader is best illustrated by the pathology of those who currently reside at the top. The story of Dr Manmohan Singh began, more than eight years ago in a Central Hall drama of tear-soaked political kitsch, as an accidental prime minister. The story is bound to end as an inevitable embarrassment. Then, his inexperience in the intrigues of realpolitik was his asset. He was the moderniser, an international brand, and the newest wise man from the East, an epitome of moderation in a polity of extreme passions. His first term was a period of consolidation and conviction; it saw the birth of a politician who was ready to forsake his chair for his beliefs. He dared the comrades who cried "imperialism" as the government stood by its commitment to the nuclear deal with the United States. If it was a vote against NDA in 2004, it was a definitive vote for Manmohan's UPA government in 2009. Sonia Gandhi's choice became India's too.Today he is still in office but, as someone said of the former British prime minister John Major, not in power. He is the face, unreadable as ever, of a regime which has made India a global headline of corruption and bad governance. He must be the only leader of a government in any mature democracy who could afford to dissociate himself from his own corruptiontainted Cabinet and take refuge in the make-believe of "see nothing, hear nothing, do nothing". Even as the ground beneath UPA continued to erode with life-threatening ferocity, he floated in the thin air of South Block as if he was beyond the law of gravity. His rating in the poll has seldom risen above average; it has now hit an all-time low, that too in spite of his last desperate measures in reforms. The record of UPA denies the fall of Manmohan Singh, one of Indian politics' biggest letdowns, even a sem-blance of poignancy. He is all about what a leader should not be.It is not that the leader ideal is easily available on the other side. When the poll was conducted, Nitin Gadkari as the president of BJP was at the peak of his infamy, in a suicidal mission to bring the party down with him. He almost succeeded. As the RSS's favourite apparatchik refused to acknowledge how much his business interest has damaged the political interest of the party, BJP was force-led by the Sangh to rally behind him. He singlehandedly managed to neutralise the moral advantage BJP had gained over a UPA steeped in scandals. His sordid saga of survival in the face of mounting allegations of shady business deals made it a level playing field for the corrupt and the discredited, no matter which party they belonged to.The Gadkari chapter also re-emphasised the limits of BJP's freedom as political party; there was a Higher Voice in Nagpur and the commandments of RSS were not meant to be defied. BJP is yet to emerge as a modern right wing party in tune with the aspirations and attitudes of twenty-first century India, and it won't as long as it is subordinated to the diktats of an organisation steeped in the cultural fantasy of an exclusivist Hindu Ruritania. The vote against Gadkari in the opinion poll is also an indication of how India disapproves of the way the party has allowed itself to be led by the archaic RSS. On January 22, Gadkari lost the fight and Nagpur was forced to abandon its pet sevak as it realised, much belatedly, even the indefensible could not be defended forever. Still, the question remains unanswered: Rajnath Singh is the new president of BJP but who is the leader of BJP? The party is the beneficiary of UPA's squandered mandate and the hard work by some of its chief ministers; it has come this far in the poll not because of its central leadership but in spite of it. To turn stagnation into surge, it needs more than a functional president; it needs a leader who can inspire the base and invigorate India with the force of ideas.The poll throws up a choice: Narendra Modi. India's most successful chief minister is the country's candidate for prime minister. With 36 per cent of the vote, he is 14 points above his challenger from Congress, Rahul Gandhi. The rest-including L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan-are condemned to one-digit irrelevance. And in a direct fight between Modi and Rahul, an overwhelming 57 per cent want the Gujarat chief minister and 41 per cent prefer the newly appointed vice-president of Congress. As leaders, nothing unites them except their popularity. Modi, who first discovered his India from an RSS shakha, is the closest to a modern politician in tune with the times India has got. Gujarat is unarguably the best governed state in the country with a growth rate that is higher than the national average. As an administrator, Modi has proved that change can be more than a slogan if you have the political will, that power corrupts only those who put personal interest over national interest. As a communicator, he has the words as well as the style to get easy access to the hearts and minds of his people; he is the message and the messenger. His credibility is as solid as his integrity.Still, his party, swelling with leaders whose egos are larger than their constituencies, is not sure about him. Modi's national popularity is not matched by his popularity within his own organisation. Even though India has been consistently choosing him as the most qualified prime minister candidate across the political spectrum (as our previous opinion polls show), the central leadership, which is dominated by superannuated patriarchs and scheming apparatchiks, is too intimidated by his rise to market him as the future. One of the most captivating transformation sagas in Indian politics, Modi has come a long way from being an ubiquitous office bearer in Delhi to the anti-hero of 2002 riots to the highest priest and practitioner of development politics with a national fan following.Pitted against him is the Chosen One. Rahul Gandhi is all that Modi is not. The latest claimant to the throne from one of the world's oldest political dynasties, he didn't have to struggle to become the most eligible candidate for prime ministership. For him, politics is all about the rewards of inheritance and the possibilities of entitlement. A week ago in Jaipur, when he was officially made number two in Congress, holy ghosts of the family must have been rejoicing at the sight of another initiation ceremony. The joy of Congressmen overflowed in Jaipur; they have been waiting for the moment for so long. But the party has not said that he would be the prime minister candidate of 2014; nor has it said he would be leading the campaign. It doesn't matter; every instance of the Rahul elevation energises Congressmen whose political reflexes have been conditioned by their eternal allegiance to the most powerful surname in Indian politics. This Gandhi, though, is different. His defining traits are reluctance, not resolution; tentativeness, not spontaneity; remoteness, not intimacy. He is young by Indian political standards but his vocabulary borrows heavily from the socialist platitudes of his elders. Still, the inevitability of Rahul as the singular leader of Congress only confirms the limits of internal democracy in India's Grand Old Party. The best and the brightest in the party can only grow up to the level predetermined by the Dynasty. They don't have to fight among themselves as long as a Gandhi is there at the top even if he is not the smartest from the bloodline; they can only aspire to become another Manmohan Singh to the Family, which knows that it doesn't require the benefits of an elected office to wield absolute power.So, is it that India is left with no choice, as the poll suggests, but a rising Rahul in a falling Congress and a towering Modi in a stagnant BJP? Going by the demands of India, demographically one of the youngest nations in the world, they are far from being the ideal leaders; they are the best India can get in a bad situation. And they have a chance to be better if only they dare to break out of their comfort zone. It is not that they don't have role models within their own political families to learn from. Modi cannot be an Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the only prime minister BJP had and India's best ever according to our poll, just by miming his mannerisms. A poet among politicians, Vajpayee has set the gold standard in the politics of moderation and the policy of inclusiveness. India is still indebted, and it continues to indulge him in its memory even though he has long left public life. Modi evokes admiration and awe; he has not yet earned national affection. His popularity doesn't unify; it polarises India. And it will be so as long as he refuses to say sorry for the horrors of 2002. An apology is not necessarily an admission of mea culpa; it is the mark of a statesman to say sorry for the crime of others, and India is waiting for one from him.For Rahul, reading the biographies of his grandmother and great grandfather will be the finest education he can get in leadership. For Nehru, politics was not party building but nation building: "Elections will be over in a few days. I'm interested in other big issues... We must understand one another because we have great tasks at hand...The people must participate in the task of nation building," so went a stump speech of his during the 1957 General Elections. The stage on which Indira Gandhi played out the script of the volatile Mother India was the mass mind; she made an emotional covenant with nation-and it is still intact.The popularity of Modi and Rahul doesn't conceal their imperfections-or the search of India for a leader who can read the zeitgeist. The leader of the 21st century has to step beyond the expediencies of realpolitik and the language of politics-as-usual to face up to the historic shifts around him-on the streets and campuses, on facebook pages and tweets, in the marketplace and in the laboratories. In his Vanity Fair essay on the challenges for new leadership, Todd S. Purdum quotes Lincoln: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." India, too, is waiting for a leader who can survive the storm and redeem the Republic.