"Economic resolutions are always confusing", Mr Krishna told newspersons in response to a question if he agreed with his party's latest stand that the government should retain 51 per cent equity while divesting a public sector undertaking.

But more than the economic resolution, it is the political resolution that mattered most to Congressmen who are now under elan to be ready for political changes in states and even at the Centre. The party , for example, has readied itself for coalition with other "like-minded parties" in order to get back to power.

Mr Krishna hastened to add, however, that once the plenary adopts the policy, there is none to question it. "After all, it is the highest policy making body", he said with an apparent tinge of sarcasm. By all accounts, Mr Krishna is not the only chief minister to hold this view. Even Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh is said to have expressed his reservations on his party's disinvestment policy.

Both chief ministrs, it may be recalled, have gone ahead with disinvestments of PSUs as part of the ongoing reforms, little realising the volte face that their party would make on the issue. Mr Krishna said he had already set up a re-structuring commission of PSUs whose report is expected soon.

But the discomfiture of former finance minister and harbinger of reforms Dr Manmohan Singh could not have been more pronounced. Dr Singh fielded to justify the new economic resolution for its final adoption. He said in his speech that growth with social justice has been party's creed and that is the need of a country like India. He said the NDA government has debunked the reforms process which needed to be streamlined.

Before adopting the economic resolution formally and prededing, Dr Manmohan Singh, Ms Sonia Gandhi set the tone in her presidential address to the plenary. Denying suggestions that the NDA is, after all, implementing the reforms agenda of the Congress, Mrs Gandhi said: "This is completely false.

Our policies are not being practised , but parodied. We differ fundamentally on many issues like the public sector, food subsidies and bank nationalisation." It is only the Congress that combined a liberal economic policy with a pro-active social policy, she stressed.

Hitting out at the NDA government, Mrs Gandhi said the economy has been experiencing a deceleration of growth and is in the grip of an investment famine." All that the BJP coaltion could do is to mount an ideological assault and destroy the edifice of the public sector built up with savings of lakhs and lakhs of our people", Mrs Gandhi declared amid applause from a large gathering of Congressmen, including CWC members, PCC delegates and special invitees from different states of the country.

A special resolution on farmers has also been adopted amid loud cheers in what was obviously a political message to the farming community that the party is behind them. This is apart from the political resolution which hammered the Vajpayee-led NDA rule.

The resolution on agriculture declared that the prices of most farm products and commodities have collapsed because of wrong policies of the Vajpayee government . Instead of owning up its responsibility, the government is content to make the WTO the alibi for its own incompetence, the party said.