New Delhi, April 11: Till as late as last year, Prakash Karat would dodge reporters and television crew. He would spot them coming and silently slip away upstairs to his office in the CPM headquarters.

All ?media interactions? were left to his predecessor Harkishen Singh Surjeet and colleague Sitaram Yechury. Essentially an introvert, Karat was the theoretician of the CPM, its ideologue who kept to himself in his tiny office on the 2nd floor of AK Gopalan Bhavan.

But the 18th party congress of the CPM has ambushed his privacy and swept away his reticence. The man who never crossed the threshold of Parliament in his political life has been catapulted into the CPM driver?s seat. He has been asked to lead the party at a time its visibility in Delhi is at an all-time high.

Within an hour of the announcement, Karat found himself face to face with national and international media brigades. But he was well prepared for the top job. Although the leadership change was made official today, the writing had been on the wall for the last two months when Karat started addressing news conferences in place of Surjeet.

The central committee today chose Karat to lead the party. There was a loud buzz that Prakash ? the ?hardliner? in the CPM ? would not be hard on the UPA government and reforms.

Comrades said the distinction between hardliners and softliners has become blurred with the changes in the political situation. ?Prakash Karat of 2005 is not the Prakash Karat of 1996,? one of them said.

In 1996, Karat and many of his colleagues had voted against the CPM?s participation at the Centre. In 2005, Karat has been saying the CPM will back the Congress-led regime so that it lasts its five-year term.

Comrades said the ?hardline-softline? contradiction does not really work in the case of the general secretary who will have to go along with the majority decision of the central committee regardless of individual political views.

?What happened to Surjeet? He was flexible and a softliner but all through his tenure he remained a minority within the party,? Yechury said.

All through his political life, Karat ? like most CPM members from Bengal and Kerala ? has been staunchly anti-Congress. But in the changed political context, the same stand cannot hold good, CPM leaders said.

In many ways, the political backgrounds of Karat and his predecessor are a study in contrasts. Surjeet cut his political teeth fighting the British in undivided Punjab and was a peasant leader. Prakash followed a different political course.

An MSc in political science from Scotland?s Edinburgh University, Prakash headed the Jawaharlal Nehru University students? union during Emergency. He was then known as ?Comrade Sudhir? to SFI recruits.

As general secretary of the party that is the backbone of the UPA, Karat will have to wade through the troubled waters of coalition politics. Surjeet was at ease with Samajwadi Party leaders, whether it was Mulayam Singh Yadav or Amar Singh. Karat has so far kept his distance from them.

But of late, he had started attending meetings with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister P. Chidambaram. As the new face of the CPM, Karat looks well on the way to re-inventing himself.