•DK Singh: Now that you have no constraint from allies, are we going to see a thrust to reforms in the banking or insurance sector?

We want to go ahead with banking, insurance and pension reforms because we need long-term funds. We need funds whether through partial disinvestment of profitable public undertakings or any other way. In case we can take our allies from Tamil Nadu and West Bengal on board, then we would like to push for partial disinvestment and reforms in these sectors.

•Vinay Sitapati: After 26/11, when former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was asked to resign, you were spoken of as a possible replacement, so what went wrong? Also, Deshmukh was asked to resign for his failure in preventing the Mumbai terror attack. What sense does it make to get him back as a Central minister?

I was doing work here. To drop that and take up a new responsibility months before the elections was never seriously considered. As for the second question, I can’t answer it. It is PM’s prerogative.

Unni Rajen Shanker: In UP and Bihar, you decided to go it alone and it was a successful experiment. Are you going to do that in Maharashtra too?

I would like to clarify that both in UP and Bihar, there was no ideological clash. What happened was that we tried to explain to our friends that the Congress’s footprint in UP and Bihar has increased, the support base is greater and we want the number of seats accordingly. Both the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janta Dal have admitted that they made a mistake in underestimating the Congress’s strength. So it is not as if we wanted to dump our allies. We could have done that in Maharashtra and Jammu and Kashmir too. In UP and Bihar, the work done by Rahul Gandhi and his team was significant but the allies did not give us credit for that and therefore did not give us the seats we asked for.

... contd.