P V Narasimha Rao

The good that men do, said Mark Antony, is oft interred with their bones. P V Narasimha Rao, who passed away last Thursday, didn't wait that long.

He managed to negate the good that he did""economic reform""not just during his life time but during his 5-year prime ministership itself.

He allowed the Babri Masjid to be torn down by an organised mob. What he gave the Congress party with one hand, the right to claim economic success, he took away with the other, the right to Muslim votes that would help it win parliamentary elections on its own.

So what history will see of the man who presided over one of the most decisive decades is a Janus-like man. It is said about him that he was indecisive in the extreme.

If so, he leaves behind a fitting legacy""no one can decide if he was a good Prime Minister or a bad one. Indeed, typically for a man not given to making value judgments, he has rendered that judgment about him as well futile. So in the end the only thing that can be said of him with any degree of certainty is that he was a pragmatist.

Perhaps it was deep scholarship that made him so. Perhaps he was the quintessential Hindu insofar as the concept of moral absolutes was alien to him.

Perhaps he was just a politician par excellence for whom the ends justified the means. Perhaps he was all of this. It is easy to conclude that he was amoral, in both his public and his private lives.

But his private life was his business; and where public life is concerned, one can only invoke the prostitute's challenge to cast the first stone. Let Congressmen not forget: the JMM affair saved their government.

Where economic reform is concerned, whether he believed in them or not, Mr Rao saw them as being unavoidable and went ahead. The benefits are there for all to see.

Even where the Babri Masjid was concerned, his inaction has had the undeniable effect of removing what could have become a running sore in the body politic.

If Ayodhya has died as a hot political issue, no small credit goes to Mr Rao for removing a very visible bone of contention. If Mr Rao determined that Ram did not belong to the BJP alone, who is to argue with him?

Except that Ram remains a BJP issue and the Muslims have been alienated. In the end, therefore, there is the economic reform that he initiated, and for which he will be remembered with gratitude.