NEW DELHI, 30 June — Quiz Question: Who was K. Kamraj Nadar? It is not a trick question. But it may seem an unfair one in an environment where many might find it troublesome to answer "Who was Nehru?" Kamraj was a politician from Tamil Nadu, an astute and honest man who rose from the nameless ranks of Indians who fought for their freedom to hold, for a while in the sixties, the destiny of the nation in his formidable hands.

Kamraj never became a minister in Delhi. He reached a position infinitely more powerful in those days, when he was elected president of the Indian National Congress. Those were days when the prime minister of India was not afraid of the president of the Congress.

Those were also days when the president of the Congress was not afraid of the prime minister of India. That generation was confident of its stature and therefore had no problem when it came to sharing power.

The Congress lived by a different philosophy then. Every region of the country was represented in the central power structure, unlike today when one individual seeks to represent all the regions of the country. It was collective leadership, and even a titan like Nehru realized its value when the moment of crisis arrived.

It did arrive; and as suited a titan, the proportions were titanic. Neither Jawaharlal nor his government were the same after the humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China, a confrontation purchased by hard-liners in the government led by Morarji Desai but also bought by Jawaharlal himself.

Although the next general elections were scheduled only for 1967, Congress leaders could see defeat as clearly as the next politician, even against a disunited opposition. Any thoughts of replacing Jawaharlal himself quickly dissolved in the heat of his continuing popularity (much as Gamel Nasser seemed even more indispensable to Egypt after his humiliation by Israel in 1967).

But the Congress knew it had to reinvent itself, and reset the compass of its government. From this conviction emerged the plan named after the Congress president, the Kamraj Plan. Nehru dropped half his Cabinet including his virtual deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai, with instructions that they leave power to return to the people via the party. This would also create space for a younger generation who would bring to governance the dynamism of new ideas and the rewards of simple hard work.

That was the theory in any case. It could not really be put to test because within a few months of the Kamraj Plan Nehru suffered a stroke, while sitting on the dais, at the Bhubaneswar session of the Congress in January 1964. That changed all equations. After he died in the summer of that year Lal Bahadur Shastri became prime minister, and gave a place to Indira Gandhi in his Cabinet.

The rest is as much mystery as history but that is another story — except to note that it was Kamraj who surprised the Congress and the country by installing Indira Gandhi as prime minister when Shastri died, suddenly, at Tashkent just after the historic talks with Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.

It is apparent that at some point during the last session of Parliament Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee decided that his government and his party needed a Kamraj Plan-style shake-up and shake-out. All doubts ended with the failure of governance and collapse of civil society in Gujarat, for which Delhi had to share responsibility. The government that had been sworn in after his reelection was dead. Rebirth was essential. Instead of a government behind him Vajpayee had a carcass around his neck.

Vajpayee has one motto that he does not advertise: Sweet are the uses of adversity. The worst moment of his prime ministership came during his first term, when despite the high of formal nuclear-power status the government was stuck in a whirlpool of despond and inaction. The BJP was wiped out in the first assembly elections it fought after coming to power. That seemed to wake up the prime minister. Within weeks he crafted two policy lines that have become the sinews of this administration: One line thrown to Pakistan in the hope that someone on the other side will pick it up; and a second to the economy, in the hope that reform will change India for the better.

By early this year it was evident that both lines had become hopelessly tangled. Relations between India and Pakistan are always prone to the dramatic, and every initiative is fraught with unseen dangers. The rewards of success might be high; the cost of failure can be devastating. The collapse of the Agra gambit had direct consequences on the ground as the conflict in Kashmir took on the proportions of a semi-declared war.

The prime minister had two options. One was to use the Advani-Fernandes route to open war with Pakistan despite the possibility of nuclear devastation; the second was to use the much more difficult, painstaking and non-glamorous option of diplomacy. For the record Vajpayee left both choices open but there is no doubt that he put his own credibility and hopes behind the efforts of his foreign minister.

The performance of a government is by and large measured by that of its key ministries: home, finance, external affairs, defense, human resources. The one ministry with a consistent record of deft success has been external affairs; and in the last few months Jaswant Singh has excelled himself. This is not the place for a fuller analysis of foreign policy; suffice to note that the minister had the extremely difficult task of telling a confounded world that India was ready for war without sounding like a warmonger, and simultaneously arguing the Indian case on Jammu and Kashmir without sounding like a self-server or, worse, an authoritarian.

Circumstances helped of course. America has now made it clear, to Pakistan as well as to Palestine, that it is not ready to see any merit in the use of blood shed by fighters.

The very success of such tactics became a problem for those who hoped to benefit from them, for the dominant power of America weighs heavily on governments such as the one in Pakistan, which do not have the ballast of popular support. But the world is a little larger than America, although it may not often seem so.

Delhi was able to place its arguments with some success across the Islamic world. It did not isolate Pakistan, but it did not allow Pakistan to dominate the debate either. It is an irony therefore that Jaswant is the favored candidate to become the next finance minister. It is the kind of reward that he would hope to avoid.

But that was the end of the good news for the prime minister.

Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha may be the favorite victim of the season, but the record of more admired ministers is hardly worthy of applause. I do not care too much for labels. Hawks and doves become so often meaningless clichés in the exercise of governance.

Necessity is equally the mother of invention. A dove is required to polish talons and hawks must smile and smile on command. As a citizen all I want from a home minister is the right to live in peace in my country. I do not want to float on a river of destruction that has been carved out to leave Indian communities on different banks, because the ruling party wants a vote bank.

A home minister may not be able to prevent a militant from crossing the border with Pakistan, but he should be able to prevent that militant from traveling hundreds of miles to try and blow up Parliament or sow havoc in the heart of India.

The collapse of the Finance Ministry was a harder blow to Vajpayee because there could be no revival of his government without an economic vision.

Yashwant has presented five budgets, and you will find it difficult to find a word that defines such a long reign in office. He began well. He started with the pace of a hundred meters dash, and ended up as a pedestrian. In the last two years Yashwant has been going nowhere very fast. As a result finance has become a ministry without purpose, helpless about revenues uncollected and relieved by ministries that have left their allocations unspent.

With confrontation a continuing fact of life, George Fernandes had the opportunity to rise in public esteem. Instead he has given the Defense Ministry its worst scandal since Bofors, and the guns of Bofors were really trained on the prime minister of the time rather than the defense minister or the defense establishment. He has energy but too much of it is spent in public or populist relations that is not necessarily appreciated by the command structure of the armed forces.

The prime minister has promised a "major" reshuffle. This piece is being written on the eve of the revelations, but if by "major" he is thinking of merely numbers then Monday will not serve any purpose as far as he is concerned. There has to be a qualitative change in the government as much as a quantitative one.

The Kamraj Plan had impact because Morarji Desai himself had to go. No one expects Home Minister L.K. Advani to be dropped; indeed he is going to be elevated to the status of deputy prime minister. But with or without the Home Ministry?

It is a question that must be traveling repeatedly through the mind of M.M. Joshi, who was home minister for a brief period under Vajpayee.

To drop Yashwant is no longer news; the bigger story would be if he was retained. The real story is his replacement. If the prime minister wants to return to aggressive reform, then he needs a person who has the conviction to push through an agenda and the clout to carry the party along. That is the job profile, but who gets the job?

This mid-point crisis has inadvertently also revealed the limitations of choice before the prime minister. The party President J. Krishnamurthi is being soothed by a Cabinet post but his reaction to impending change has been immature at the very least.

There is no permanent job in public life, and he supposedly comes from a branch of the Hindutva family that never entered public life for cushions. You do not open fire on your own side from the trenches. That is inexcusable. He has done that. But at least it is clear that there will be a new party chief with a new team that will include some of the better ministers like Arun Jaitley. How major is major? Will the word include all senior levels of power in the ruling structure? In other words, will there be accountability among chief ministers. If good governance is at the heart of Vajpayee’s intentions then he cannot leave Gujarat and Narendra Modi outside his balance sheet.

I suspect, although of course I could be wrong, that Vinay Katiyar has been made chief of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh to soften the hard-liners for some bad news on Monday. If they have their man in the largest state, they should be willing to accommodate a change elsewhere.

Farooq Abdullah is likely to find a place in the new Cabinet if only because the National Conference is going to be left unprotected in Jammu and Kashmir. When Delhi promises free and fair elections it means that it will not permit any rigging. It is the National Conference’s turn to pay the price of power. That could mesh with a parallel strategy on the whole Kashmir debate. But that is too far into the future.

The first step toward the future will be taken tomorrow. We have been promised a stride, not a shuffle.

You shuffle only sideways, and many a reshuffle has ended up taking a government backward. On Friday, Vajpayee ended the suspense when he announced that changes would take place. Tomorrow he will end the speculation. On Tuesday we can take another look at the balance sheet and see if there are enough credit lines left to prepare a new business plan for the government.