‘I was not Prime Minister by lottery’

‘‘I am hearing this for the first time,’’ says Gujral. He cannot recall any meeting of MPs of the UF where votes were cast but ever the mild-mannered ‘‘consensual’’ man, Gujral does not wish to contradict Surjeet. ‘‘There were so many meetings at that time, maybe this number came up at one of them,’’ he adds. The one meeting he does remember was in Andhra Pradesh Bhavan. TDP boss Chandrababu Naidu, ‘‘who was authorised to work out the nitty gritty’’ of choosing Deve Gowda’s successor, had invited him to the meeting.

“(When I arrived,) two or three groups were not sitting together, some were on the first floor, others on the second. Since I was not involved (in any of the groups), I began to feel sleepy and asked Naidu to find me a bedroom and went there to sleep,’’ he says. “At 3 am, ‘‘they woke me up and said I was their choice.’’

Gujral was pleased but not surprised. ‘‘I never lobbied for the job, I never went around asking for support,’’ he says, but then adds, ‘‘in the entire UF, I had the longest experience in governance.’’ After all, he had been the foreign minister in the Deve Gowda government and had been part of the combine since his stint in the V.P. Singh Cabinet.

And long before any UF leader had tasted power, Gujral had been a a minister under Indira Gandhi. ‘‘There is hardly a portfolio that I have not held in Indira Gandhi’s government,’’ he says.

On taunts that he lacked mass support, Gujral asks, ‘‘Who has individual mass support? The main thing is I was part of the UF, part of JD. I have been in politics since my student days.”