NEW DELHI » The Commonwealth Games, which opened 12 days ago with the world bracing for the worst, managed to conclude Thursday without undue embarrassment or disaster. Stadiums did not collapse. Terrorists did not strike. Fears of disease went mostly unrealized. And the closing ceremony was a stirring success.

Indeed, some of the same officials who before the games were fighting over who should be blamed are now fighting over who should get credit. The sniping suggested that much of India’s political class, rather than being chastened by the glaring failures in preparations and the huge cost overruns, seemed inclined to declare victory, raising the question of what lessons, if any, they actually absorbed.

Even before the opening ceremony, one domestic commentator declared India’s performance as host as “largely acceptable,” and that seemed to equate to good enough.

It was not ringing praise, but it did reflect the imperfect if face-saving comeback made by Indian officials after a games prelude so disorganized and poorly prepared that several nations threatened not to show up.

In the end, every nation came and the events went off relatively smoothly. If minor problems persisted, like flaws with the ticketing system, the public mood seemed to shift from anger at the official folly before the Games to excitement over the success of Indian athletes once the competitions were under way.

“Right now, everyone seems to have forgotten about what went wrong,” said Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst in New Delhi. “Now the mood is that the government did well.”

On Thursday, The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language newspaper, reported that Delhi’s lieutenant governor, Tejender Khanna, had complained in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that too much of the credit for the “turnaround miracle” in cleaning up the athletes’ village was going to Delhi’s chief minister, Sheila Dikshit.

To many analysts and critics, the self-congratulations were misplaced, and opposite lessons should be drawn, as the Commonwealth Games demonstrated the inability of India’s bureaucracy to efficiently deliver, even on a project intended as a showpiece to the world.

“All the worst elements of the government system have been showcased,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst who teaches at Delhi University. “Will they learn a lesson? I don’t know.”

International sports competitions have become branding events for rising powers like China, Brazil, South Africa and India that are muscling into the top tiers of the global economic order. Staging an athletic event is a tool for instilling national pride and for testing the ability of a government to manage a huge, complicated undertaking as the rest of the world watches. But predicting what lessons will be drawn from the success or failure of an event is tricky at best.

Many analysts predicted that the 2008 Beijing Olympics would have a liberalizing influence on China and might lead to an expansion of civil liberties and a reduction of the power of the state, much the way the 1988 Seoul Games accelerated political change in South Korea. Instead, the Beijing Games were regarded as such a logistical and athletic success that the ruling Communist Party concluded that changing the state-dominated system made little sense. Reforms remain stalled.

India’s messy staging of the Commonwealth Games has only reinforced the widespread perception of governmental dysfunction. Yet, judging from different commentaries in the Indian media, no consensus seems clear on how to address the root problem, with some people arguing that the unorthodox is central to the Indian method.

Jug Saraiya, the essayist who wrote of the largely acceptable performance, said India had overcome the poor planning of its officials and “snatched victory” by invoking its rule-bending, improvisational spirit. Others argued that the country’s bureaucracy merely reflected an Indian culture conditioned by a fatalism reflected in the Hindi expression “sab ho jayega,” or, roughly put, “in the end, all will be done.”

“Indians leave a lot to chance and providence,” said Dr. Monu Singh, 42, an orthopedist who attended a hockey match with his wife and son. “They always think that ultimately it will get done, so lots of things were left to be done at the last minute. It is definitely inbuilt in our culture. The country cannot change overnight.”

Like many others, Singh wants change, especially greater accountability and efficiency from the government. Both the prime minister and Sonia Gandhi, president of the governing Indian National Congress Party, have promised full investigations now that the games have ended. Audits have already highlighted immense waste and poor planning, and corruption investigations are expected against the head of the country’s organizing committee, Suresh Kalmadi, as well as others beneath him.

During an otherwise exuberant closing ceremony, where the president of the Commonwealth Games praised India for staging a “truly exceptional event,” a sour note was reserved for Kalmadi. The crowd jeered him.

Rangarajan, the political analyst, said a failure to address the waste and expenditures — estimated as high as $15 billion — could set off a political backlash in a country with rampant food inflation and hundreds of millions of people living on less than $2 a day.

The Games did create public interest in new sports in a country where attention is usually fixated on cricket. The Commonwealth Games is a competition among 71 nations and territories affiliated with the Commonwealth.

The usual powerhouses, Australia and England, finished first and second in total medals. But India improved strikingly, topping more than 100 medals for the first time and finishing second in total golds with 38. And it was the personal stories of some of the Indian athletes that captured the churning energy and grass-roots desire for a better life evident in so many pockets of the country. Deepika Kumari, the gold medal archer, grew up as the daughter of an impoverished auto-rickshaw driver in eastern India.

India still hopes to play host to the Olympics eventually, even as the Commonwealth Games made clear that the country had a long way to go to get there. Sandeep Dikshit, a member of Parliament and the son of the Delhi chief minister, agreed that the problems with the Commonwealth Games would affect India’s chance in bidding for future athletic events. But he rejected any suggestion that India would lose its luster as an investment target or would see its global influence diminished.

“I don’t think it is really going to make much of a difference,” he said in an interview at the athletes’ village a few days before the opening ceremony. “If people think a mismanaged Games will hurt our growth, or that our private sector will not be welcomed in other places, or that Coca-Cola will not want to invest here — I do not think so.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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