WINDS OF CHANGE

strengthen the people and strengthen the political life or democracy in this country? I have never seen anywhere more tragic self-deception than this. So this talk of polarisation, this talk of coalition is something very unrealistic, something which I personally consider to be very unwise. Now then, what is the way out? We cannot go and join this political gherao of our own. We cannot have anything with those national parties which are divided on the left-right and other types. What do we do? I think the only thing that we can do is to decide to go all the way all alone depending not on men, but on the ideology, the programmes and the policies of the Congress. This is the only way to save thte Congress and the only way to save the nation. Please don't suppose that I am trying to glorify what we are doing. Please don't think that we are being complacent. I do understand the necessity of self-criticism. That party which does not have the capacity for self-criticism has not much of a future. But at the same time we have to take a balanced view of self-criticism also. The self-criticism, in order that it remains a criticism, has to be constructive; it has to be objective. But what do we find today? Sell-criticism is degenerating into self-denigration, self-condem­nation. In our criticism, we have to be objective. We can discuss policies, analyse policies, find out the facts, find out the deficien­cies in the implementation and try to improve it. But at the present moment, I find that it has become a fashion to say that everything is wrong with the Congress — Congress programme is wrong: Congress leadership is wrong: Congress organisation is wrong. I do admit that there is something wrong. But can we say that everything is wrong? There are crores of people who are still supporting the Congress. Are they supporting it because they are fools, or they are blind? There is something historically dynamic in the Congress programme and in the Congress organisation even today. In order to realise our faults, in order to undertake self-criticism, it is not necessary to condemn ourselves. Sometimes this attitude of self-denigration and self-condemnation has gone to such absurd length that it becomes clownish. I do not want to criticise any individual person, because I believe that everybody is honest about his view. But we find that yesterday some person moved two resolutions; one was for the dissolution of the Congress and the other was to create a cadre of the Congress Party. Do they want to have a cadre of the Congress to dissolve the Congress? I mentioned about the clownish posture that is adopted these days.