Narayan Rane to bare all in memoir

Seasoned politician Narayan Rane has penned his memoir in which his looks back at the years he has spent in the dog-eat-dog world of Indian politics and also tells stories of his encounters with the who's who of the game in Maharashtra and at the Centre.

"No Holds Barred: My Years In Politics", co-authored with Priyam Gandhi-Mody, will hit book stores on May 6.

Packed with revealing stories of his encounters with the bigwigs of politics - ranging from the Thackerays, Pramod Mahajan, Gopinath Munde, Manohar Joshi, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ashok Chavan and Devendra Fadnavis to Sharad Pawar, Ahmed Patel and Rahul and Sonia Gandhi, this is a candid and fearless tell-all that exposes the true nature of India's corridors of power, publisher HarperCollins India said.

Rane says he learnt the hard way very early in life - that to work for the people of the land, just good intent will not cut it.

"You need power - the kind which has a personality of its own and makes sure that the one who wields it is constantly spoken about by one and all - whether it's good things or bad is inconsequential," he says.

"The kind of power that makes all other people - politicians, money spinners, corporate tycoons, foreign investors - feel servile. And this kind of power comes from one and only one source in modern India. Rajneeti (politics)," he adds.

Early in 1999, when Shiv Sena chief Balasaheb Thackeray decided to install a new chief minister in Maharashtra, he was asked who the man of his choice was.

"New CM? Narayan Rane," he replied, as though the question need not even have arisen. His pick was a leader who had first caught his attention as a teenager in a Mumbai suburb when Thackeray had just started his party in the 1960s.

The Shiv Sainik with close access to the supremo, however, stormed out of the party and joined the Congress in 2005.

In the years that followed, he was a powerful fixture in the cabinet of one of India's most politically significant states Maharashtra - always with a fighting chance of making a comeback as chief minister, and perennially holding out an existential threat not only to his one-time bosses in the Shiv Sena but also the leaders of his own party.

Today, having broken from the Congress too and been elected to the Rajya Sabha on a BJP nomination, he remains as unpredictable and aggressive as ever.