'I am merely recapitulating facts, not apportioning blame'

This is really not very difficult to understand. When you embark on an elaborate scheme of change, several unforeseen shortcomings creep in. Due to the euphoric rhetoric we adopt, the urges of the people suddenly rise sky-high while the capacity and pace of translating the schemes into reality lag far behind in the short run.

The ruling party, on which alone falls the responsibility of piloting the schemes, is unable to create the motivation in a short time, particularly when the change proposed is sudden and far-reaching.

Party activists either cannot acquire the required conviction or tend to look upon the change as the leader's 'fad', aberration or downright surrender to other countries or bodies -- chiefly America, IMF, World Bank, etc. The pattern is familiar.

In a matter like this, it is not easy to trace your policies back to Nehru, although I am personally convinced that there is a clear nexus. If you don't establish the nexus, you are dubbed as a renegade, alien to the Gandhi-Nehru line, India-seller, etc., and therefore fit to be removed as leader -- the logic is instantaneous. It is often difficult to separate the argument from the intention.

Much of it is thus connected with intra-party politics and also with the leader's limitations in articulating, without accompaniment, such a big change -- all by himself -- with many others whispering opposition through familiar slogans ingrained in the party rank and file for decades.

For instance, there was no clear distinction drawn between our economic reforms and the classical laissez-faire; and yet, this is the gravamen of our reforms. We refused to have an exit policy, without which liberalisation was unthinkable in those days. The Middle Path, Reforms With a Human face, Market-plus -- all these concepts were our own innovations, but they did not seep down into our party ranks or in the people in general who normally receive such new ideas from the party ranks.

On the contrary, reforms got equated with benefits to the rich, unlimited consumerism and more misery to the poor. In the media, notably government media, advertisements of luxury goods and grand buildings, etc., abounded in the earlier years and proper presentation of anti-poverty programmes took quite some time to take off. Anti- poverty programmes do not bring revenue to the television; this was perhaps the main hurdle.

On the policy front, what I had simply called the 'By-pass model' of development was not sufficiently highlighted, although that was the main rationale of liberalisation...... I could add many more such comments, some not so, but this should suffice.

Meanwhile, the people got annoyed with the Congress party -- and all other parties; the result is well-known.

I remember a parallel from the fifties. In those days, we vied with each other to get NES (National Extension Service) programmes to our areas. But the urges created in the people were so high and the temporary inconveniences in implementing the NES programme so many (like a road being dug up and lying in that state while the sanctions for metal collection or black topping etc took a very long time and created irritation all round). In the elections following this situation, the ruling party lost in a majority such areas.

Your detractors have consistently maintained that you are soft on the BJP. Would you like to clarify your stand?

They believe in spreading falsehood; it has to be persistent to be effective. By the way, there is nothing substantively consistent in their disinformation.

In 1991, Sunday asked you how would you like to be remembered. You said, 'As an honest man who did his best.' Do you feel, five years later, that you have succeeded in being an honest man who did his best?

Yes.

Journalists like to say that you were a good prime minister but a mediocre, or even, poor party president. Can you explain to us what you feel you have contributed to the Congress over the last five years?

The new mission of the party was extremely difficult to put across. My Tirupati presidential address never had a chance to reach all sections of the party and get explained. Within days, doubts were sown everywhere.

It was so easy to talk of the poor, even without any direction as to how to go about helping them. The anti-poverty programmes of my government were in fact much better conceived and much more systematically put on the ground.

Yet, for one thing they came piecemeal, year after year, and got no concrete and effective focusing in any year -- neither by the government whose publicity apparatus was ineffective as usual, nor by the party which has to mainly concentrate on putting across these programmes.

There was always, an invisible -- sometimes visible -- brake which one could feel, but it was very difficult to remove or break through. The beliefs of 40 years were too strong. Conviction within the ranks persisted on old lines. All this was compounded by intra-party wranglings on 'one-man, one-post' controversy, etc.

I am merely recapitulating facts, not apportioning blame.

Do you ever wish that you were a charismatic leader like some of your predecessors? Or do you feel that there are other ways of providing leadership apart from mass charisma?

I have not wished to be anyone different, at any time.

Your friends and close associates portray you as a scholarly, articulate person who is detached from the demands of petty power politics. Yet, increasingly, the media have portrayed you as cold, arrogant and manipulative. Can the gulf between these two perceptions be explained by your own failures? Or do you think that the press has been needlessly harsh?

The media were kind and understanding for a longer time in my case perhaps. They have now made good for it, perhaps with a vengeance. Gulfs can be bridged with some will.