The government of India and the government of Jammu and Kashmir are determined to ensure that every Kashmiri lives with dignity having equal rights and equal opportunities.

I am comfortable at the height where destiny has put me.

I come from a political family. My father was a freedom fighter. He was a prominent leader of the locality and member of the Congress party. He spent 10 years in British prisons. In the evening, in our living room, the only subject we used to discuss was politics. So politics was not unfamiliar to me.

I have seen vast, perhaps unbelievable, changes during the journey that has brought me from the flicker of a lamp in a small Bengal village to the chandeliers of Delhi.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

We are all equal children before our mother; and India asks each one of us, in whatsoever role we play in the complex drama of nation-building, to do our duty with integrity, commitment and unflinching loyalty to the values enshrined in our Constitution.

Of course, running a coalition government in a country like India is a difficult task. More so when Congress leads the coalition, since most of the political parties were anti-Congress. To have a coalition, to run a coalition government, you require a lot of adjustments, a lot of flexibility.