Before Mrs Gandhi succumbs to the temptation, she would do well to ask herself two questions: will unseating the BJP and forming a government help the Congress party? And will it help the nation? A moment's cool reflection will show that it can do neither. By forming an alliance to unseat Mr Vajpayee the Congress will display an unseemly haste to come to power. The electorate will conclude that nothing has changed in the party, and that for it power remains an end in itself and not the means to an end, which should be good governance. The country desperately needs the latter and not the former. For three years it has had no growth whatever: agriculture, industry and, if the statistics are not fudged, the services sector have all stagnated. Three generations of job seekers have left schools and colleges only to find that there are no jobs out there for them. What makes it worse for them is that for four years between 1993 and 1996 this was not so. Ever so briefly, the country had tasted seven per cent growth, a doubling of employment generation and a decline—the very first ever—in the number of job seekers on the live register of the employment exchanges. A new era of hope had dawned, only to be proved false. Today the country is desperate for progress. Every other party has failed it, and people remember with growing nostalgia the stability and hope that the Congress had brought back to them till only three years ago. The Congress needs to build on this yearning and to feed it with responsible promises of action. It needs to remind people over and over again that coalitions, by their very nature, cannot deliver a firm and stable government. Hurrying into another coalition will be a sign that the party's promise to fight for the peoples' mandate on its own was so much hot air, and that even the confidence that Mrs Sonia Gandhi has instilled in it is hollow.