Even the most ardent quizzard will find it difficult to discover what is common to Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Deng Xiaoping, Mr Manmohan Singh, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Mr L.K. Advani. But a keen watcher of political transformations will probably answer the question with ease. All these politicians have reinvented themselves by sloughing off their former ideologies and adopting another that is radically different. All of them deny that well-known axiom of nature: a leopard does not change its spots. All of them have changed their ideological spots and refashioned their images. Mr Gorbachev began his political life as a loyal member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but history will remember him as the mastermind of perestroika which brought the curtain down on communism in Soviet Russia and in eastern Europe. Mr Deng Xiaoping was a veteran of the Long March and today he champions capitalism in China even as he pays lip service to the Chinese communist party. Mr Singh served Indira Gandhi as her loyal mandarin when she advocated a planned economy and a license-quota raj. Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the Stalinist par excellence in a previous incarnation. As chief minister, he leads the campaign to bring back private capital, including multinational corporations, to West Bengal. Mr Advani is yesterday?s darling of the sangh parivar. Today, the same parivar sees him as a traitor because he wants the Bharatiya Janata Party to abandon its Hindu image and to become a more open and inclusive party.

The transformations that these personalities have undergone ? and in the process, the era of transition that they have initiated ? have become the stuff of history. The scale and the degree of the impact they have had on events and on history have varied according to context. Mr Gorbachev played on the world stage and arguably brought into effect the most momentous event of the 20th century. The changes in China have been more gradual but no less momentous. Mr Singh pioneered liberalization in India and Mr Bhattacharjee has used it to transform the economy of West Bengal as well as the ideological space of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The impact of Mr Advani?s actions is yet to be felt, but they carry within them the potential of remaking the nature of Indian politics.

In their own different ways, these men have made or are making history; but in a very critical sense, history has made them. They reinvented themselves because the alternative was to be consigned to the junkyard of history. The winds of change have made communism and socialism irrelevant just as they have made Hindutva utterly inconsequential as a political ideology. The socialists and the communists in the list above caught that wind and changed themselves and their ideology. Mr Advani has just felt the wind in his sails. To change is to live. To cling to an irrelevant past is to become endangered. Mr George Bush in the White House should heed that unless he wants to end up in a museum.