Through all this making and unmaking of friendships, haggling and sometimes ghastly personal profit maximising, India started and never reversed its dissociation from socialism. Narasimha Rao, who politically broke the back of the economic ancien regime, did not even have a full-term parliamentary majority. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral weren’t passionate reformers. As prime ministers with little hold on real levers of power, they were content when the then ex-Congressman P. Chidambaram, who had a communist as a cabinet colleague, took up the job of reforming the economy.

Vajpayee was apparently forced by the RSS to pick Yashwant Sinha as finance minister because Sinha better understood swadeshi. But Sinha, as many astute observers of the Indian economy point out, proved to be a doughty and clever reformer. Foreign policy changed, too, in part because of another nuclear test, for which Rao, who allegedly had to buy votes to secure a House majority, had prepared brilliantly and which Vajpayee, leading the BJP’s first coalition that lasted barely a year, executed equally astutely.

So when the UPA took power in May 2004, Delhi since 1989 had been witness to plenty of bazaar politics and a few great, positive changes. The hope was that the UPA would be no different in essence. The common minimum programme was on the face of it a silly document. Actually, it contained a serious promise — that this would be the template on which policy bargaining will happen and the fig leaf that would cover policy “departures”. But then something changed. Karat’s CPM abandoned the rules of the bazaar. Bar putting some of the party’s fellow travellers in decorative public offices, Karat’s CPM wasn’t interested in give and take.

... contd.