Prime Minister Narendra Modi should be a happy man, not just because the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has, for the first time, wrested power in Assam, but also because this victory comes following the massive drubbing it got in the Delhi and Bihar polls.

Modi and the BJP would most certainly go to town claiming that the Assam electorate has validated their governance over the last two years at the centre, since they formed the first majority government in the country in three decades. But BJP should be cautious.

Apart from the fact that they stitched the right alliances, the BJP’s victory in Assam is a result primarily of two factors: massive anti-incumbency against the 15-year-old regime headed by Congress’s Tarun Gogoi, and the general, country-wide, self-inflicted decimation of the Congress party, whose leadership stubbornly refuses to learn from past mistakes and continues to be in abject denial about the political naiveté of its scion Rahul Gandhi. In fact, if governance were the sole yardstick on which people voted, Modi’s BJP might have stood little chance of victory.

This is not to say that Modi’s track record as prime minister has been any worse than that of his predecessor, Manmohan Singh. In fact, Singh’s government was voted out of power primarily because of its all round ineptitude and indecisiveness in handling key policy issues and the cavalier manner in which it dealt with big-ticket corruption. Modi, the wily politician, would fare better than Singh the reluctant politico, any day.

But Modi is burdened much by how his party sold him to the country in the year leading up to the 2014 general elections and has continued to drum up his credentials ever since. As this author noted in a December 2014 article, earlier that year, India had bought into a dream and it was time that the prime minister delivered.

However, a year and a half on, little of that seems to have happened. Again, that does not mean that the ruling party has not tried.

After successfully auctioning coalfields and other natural resources, the government also raised Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) limits in the insurance and defence sectors, although no meaningful investment has happened yet in these areas. This, despite several independent surveys suggesting that FDI inflows have touched record levels. It has committed to not initiating any new cases under the draconian retrospective tax law and has also sought to create a national agricultural market via e-auctions, which should help farmers get market-linked prices. Modi can also take heart from the fact that in the first two years under his watch, there have been no serious allegations of corruption.

Diplomacy is another area where Modi and foreign minister Sushma Swaraj can claim some much-deserved credit, especially when it comes to India’s neighbourhood. Despite the usual ups and downs, Modi has wisely chosen to keep engaging with Pakistan. This only strengthens the civilian leadership there, which, in turn, is what India wants. The historic land boundary agreement with Bangladesh too has been a shot in the arm for Modi, although Nepal continues to be a cause of worry.

Yet, for its penchant for making big-ticket announcements, little seems to have moved on the ground. As these seven charts show, business performance and consumer confidence indices have all seen a negative trend, perhaps prompting industrialists like Adi Godrej to vent their frustration against issues like the beef ban. Further, key sectors of the economy like infrastructure, power and banking continue to be weighed down by legacy issues.

One key metric for judging the performance of any government is how well and quickly it can carry through controversial, yet key legislations. Despite a majority in the Lok Sabha, the BJP has not been able to pass several important bills including the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the amendments to the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. In fact, in case of the GST, the government even went all out to get the states on board. Yet, despite making significant concessions on the bills and eating humble pie, BJP has not been able to get past the Rajya Sabha, where it does not yet have a majority.

Now, legislative business is not just a game of numbers, it is also about how effectively you can manage the shop floor, an art that was nearly perfected by the likes of the Machiavellian late Pramod Mahajan, during the premiership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The present set of floor managers, however, seem to have come a cropper when it comes to contentious legislations, save a few. But to blame just the parliamentary affairs minister or his colleagues would be unfair, when seemingly innumerable motormouths within the party and the Sangh Parivar virtually gave the opposition the handle to stall parliament.

From low voltage attacks on churches and forced conversions, to lynch mobs targeting beef eaters, and universities on the boil on issue after issue, the disparate opposition led by a desperate Congress party was virtually given a carte blanche to hold parliament to ransom. If only this government had had multiple power centres, as indeed had been the case in the post-Rajiv Gandhi era, Modi might have escaped the blame for the nefarious utterances of such supposedly fringe elements.

But this is a one-man show and the buck stops only at one table: Modi’s.

Having said all this, not all is lost. Although the BJP has two more crucial state elections — in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh — to contend with next year, it would do well to ensure that governance is not held hostage to populism.

On the economic front, Modi remains lucky as he is governing in times when global energy prices continue to be low, thereby allowing the government enough elbow room to take hard decisions, without having to worry too much about straining fiscal deficit targets.

Politically too, India seems to be entering a phase where voters are handing out decisive mandates. In fact, across all the states where the BJP has won since 2014, it has done so quite handsomely. The same holds true for non-BJP parties or pre-poll combines.

Unless something catastrophic happens, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance would still most likely return to power in 2019 (even if it is with a thinner majority perhaps). This is because even if a viable third front re-emerges, it is unlikely to pose a serious threat to Modi. For that to happen, Congress would have to rise like phoenix, which, in the present scenario, seems unlikely.

But such a victory would only be a consolation. The writing on the wall for Modi is clear: he must put his foot on the pedal and push reforms further. He cannot afford to fail.