The fruits of such decisions will have to be made available to the common man speedily.

This naturally leads to the question of the extent of popular base that the Congress enjoys as a political party. In the heyday of the freedom struggle and immediately after the attainment of independence, the Congress had a very close and living contact with the masses. In fact, we prided ourselves as belonging to an organisation which reflected the hopes and aspirations of the people, which understood and responded with a remarkable degree of spontaneity to their anguish and frustrations. Over a period of time this got eroded. Let me put it bluntly; in the pursuit of power we came to overlook the fact that power was only a means to achieve well-being of the masses. Power became an objective by itself, unrelated to any concomitant responsibilities towards the underfed, and the underclad millions of our country. It is not surprising, when one considers the evergrowing section of alert and discriminating voters, that the undivided Congress, just before the split, was in its last throes. But the split will lose its relevance if the Congress fails to show a greater awareness of the acute hardships of the masses that are seething with discontent. The workers of the Congress have to be alive to these realities of the situation. From them upward must get transmitted a new sense of urgency in meeting our commitments in terms of concrete programmes related to the aspirations of the people.

The changes necessary in the style and functioning of the Congress party must be understood in this new context. The events of the last few months have compelled us to search for a new identity based on greater ideological clarity and greater programmatic cohesion. It is the need of the hour that we shed the kind of amorphousness that has come to characterise the Congress over the decades. This will call for a rededication to the politics of commitment. This will require strengthening the forces of programmatic leadership. In the ultimate analysis, a truly national political party must be a vehicle of progressive thought and action and must act as a cementing force. The Congress party played the historic role of winning independence for the country and achieving integration of the country. It has now to accomplish the still more challenging task of economic and social transformation of the country, giving a real meaning and content to our freedom.