CONGRESS SHOULD RECOGNISE THAT IT IS NO LONGER THE NATURAL PARTY OF GOVERNANCE - MANI SHANKAR AIYAR former Union minister

Mani Shankar Aiyar says the biggest reason for his success and fall from grace was his gift of the gab. In his latest book, A Maverick in Politics (Juggernaut), Aiyar, true to form, does not mince words. He takes a no-holdsbarred look at the last three decades plus of his high-profile public life.

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

And in turn, he casts the lens on the tumultuous progress of politics in India, post-liberalisation.

Ranging from his falling out of favour with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and how P.V. Narasimha Rao got more done without doing anything even as the nation burned, Aiyar makes good copy, describing how he almost got lynched by J. Jayalalithaa's party mobs, his apprehensions as a sports minister at the goings on leading up to the Commonwealth Games scam, and the umpteen power struggles in the Congress party in general, and the UPA in particular.

Being frank to a fault, Aiyar does try to justify the many comments he made that landed him in hot water, right from calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi neech to quipping that Sheila Dikshit was like a gangster's moll in a Bollywood flick.

As his exclusive interview with THE WEEK shows, the ex-diplomat does not believe in remaining diplomatic in the sunset years of his life and he is convinced that the future of India lies in being fundamentally secular.

Edited excerpts:

Q/ In your book, you have detailed issues that have cropped up because you said things some people did not like. You firmly believe in a particular way of life where you can have opinions which may differ from somebody else's, but you can still be friends and work together. That kind of an approach seems to be lacking now.

A/ For good reason. I was six years old when Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister. My growing up years were all in the ethos of the idea of India which Nehru had spelt out in his Discovery of India. And that idea of India was what enabled him to do something that nobody in the world had done before-to trust the illiterate Indian, to trust the superstitious Indian, to trust the fractious Indian, to express his opinion openly as to who should run the country and how the country should be run.

Nobody believed that we could have a Westminster-style democracy in India on day one.