In March 1998, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the dominant party in the coalition and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the prime minister. He appointed Yashwant Sinha as finance minister.

       I was away at a conference in Colombo when news of the ministerial appointments came through and confessed to some misgivings to a colleague. All I knew about Sinha was that he was a member of Parliament from Bihar, and had served as finance minister in the short-lived, and somewhat forgettable, Chandra Shekhar government of 1990–91. I called on ...