Why did the abdication of power by Alauddin Alam Shah in favour of Bahlol Lodi not culminate in the establishment of the Lodi Dynasty? Elucidate.

The events. Alauddin Alam Shah, the last Sayyid, withdrew from Delhi to Badaun in 1448, leaving the capital to his wazir Hamid Khan. Hamid Khan invited Bahlol Lodi, the governor of Sirhind, who occupied Delhi in 1451. Alam Shah acquiesced in the transfer and lived quietly at Badaun until his death in 1478.

Why the transfer did not amount to a founding.

• What was transferred was nearly worthless. The Sultanate had contracted to the environs of the capital, captured in the contemporary jibe that the kingdom of the Lord of the World ran from Delhi to Palam. Possession of a shrunken Delhi conferred a title without a realm.
• Legitimacy did not flow from the Sayyids. Bahlol's authority rested on his Afghan tribal following and on his own military reputation, not on any grant from a discredited dynasty. A dynasty founded on a predecessor's gift would have inherited that predecessor's weakness.
• The kingdom had to be reconquered. Bahlol spent almost his entire reign fighting the Sharqi Sultans of Jaunpur, the most serious rival power, and only after that long struggle did Delhi again command territory. His authority was created by conquest, not conveyance.
• Afghan political theory worked against monarchy. Afghan nobles regarded the Sultan as first among equals. Bahlol governed accordingly, sitting among his nobles rather than above them and distributing territory among clansmen — a chieftaincy rather than a dynastic state.

What actually founded the dynasty. Bahlol's forty years of consolidation, and then Sikandar Lodi's reign from 1489, which asserted royal authority over the Afghan nobility, established an efficient revenue administration and moved the capital to Agra. The abdication of 1451 gave the Lodis a city; it was conquest and Sikandar's centralisation that gave them a dynasty.