His reams of meandering monologues may be forgotten soon because they create a lot of noise and signify nothing but Jain's relevance as a milestone in Indian political history will not be. After seven years of investigation, Justice Jain's contribution -- apart from reducing the availability of newsprint -- was that he set stage for a Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in New Delhi.

But Jain was just a catalyst. The reaction was the result of the Congress chemistry of arrogance and ignorance. The Congress has survived arrogance and ignorance, but it has not made up for its lack of sense of humour. Its mistake last year was to take a joke seriously.

As a result, the Congress alloweditself to be taken for a ride and took the nation along with it in a display of geriatric machismo. Though it masterminded the murder of a government, it could not create one and in the process welcomed the BJP to rule India.

The Congress conveniently forgot history and was condemned to repeat it. Propping up governments and pulling them down had become a pastime for the tottering party. It found excuses which were absurd and banal. It glorified trivia when it decided to execute the Chandra Shekhar government after discovering two Haryana police constables snooping around Rajiv Gandhi's residence.

The Congress had managed to take India to another election but despite the mid-poll sympathy wave generated by Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, the party which celebrated brutal parliamentary majority in the past couldn't reach the half-way mark. But the lesson was lost on the party.

The Congress did it again, six years and two general elections later. It sacrificed H.D. Deve Gowda to prove its political potency.And by the time Sitaram Kesri realised that the Congress could no longer afford such adventurism, the game had slipped out of his hands. The Congress was hijacked by a few insecure leaders who lived in their world of illusory grandeur and inflated self-importance. This time I.K. Gujral was the lamb and Justice Jain the butcher's knife.

Justice Jain did not say anything startlingly new in his interim show of attempted investigative journalism. He wrote nothing that called for the fall of a government. If he had said that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) did not support the LTTE, it would have been new -- and news.

While India officially and unofficially backed the Tigers, who expects the people who speak the same language and belong to the same race not to be emotionally behind them? Just ask Muthuvel Karunanidhi's bitter rival V. Gopalasami. Or, for that matter, George Fernandes, India's Defence Minister.

The Congress's new passion did not last long, however. The DMK disappeared from its agenda evenbefore the elections. It did not bother about Justice Jain too, who had overnight become an investigator and saint rolled into one.Elections '98 drove home the point that the voter doesn't get attracted by political stunts. And that put the Congress on a road to introspection, to look at the follies of the past. As it desperately searches the past for solutions for the future, Justice Jain comes again with a whimper, recycling the same, monotonous stories.

But where is the Congress, once a passionate reader of the gigantic heap of bound volumes? Why has it been silent?

If it is struggling to keep the flag of secularism flying as it claims, Justice Jain's second coming gives it a peg to speak out. The Congress which is singularly responsible for the BJP Government at the Centre now has to explain why it really pulled down the Gujral government and why it kept quiet after that.

If it still thinks Justice Jain is to be taken more seriously than even he could dream of, the Congress should openly say so. Ifit thinks his report was just an excuse, a joke taken out of context and blown up into surreal proportions, it should admit it.

The Congress is a party which struggles with its past more than its present. While it journeys to an uncertain future, the burden of errors and regrets hampers its moves. The Congress has no option but to try and shed the baggage of its past -- what it did with the Jain Commission's interim report is part of it.

If nothing else, the Congress owes itself, its cadres and the nation an apology for a mistake which it will take years to forget. If P.V. Narasimha Rao should pay for the demolition of the Babri Masjid, there should be someone in the Congress to own the responsibility for facilitating the BJP's arrival in New Delhi. Their names should be called out and they should be asked to pay for another big Congress blunder.

The moral of the story: A good joke calls for a laugh, a bad one a yawn but never anything else.