This refers to the report "No decision on Bansal at Cong core group meet" (May 4). The indecision on Pawan Kumar Bansal's resignation shows a vertiginous fall in probity in public life. Consider this: in 1956, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned accepting moral and constitutional responsibility for a railway accident at Ariyalur, Tamil Nadu that resulted in 144 deaths. While speaking in Parliament on the incident, Jawaharlal Nehru stated that he was accepting the resignation because it would set an example in constitutional propriety, and not because Shastri was in any way responsible for the accident. In Bansal's case, what has given resonance to the allegations is the fact that the bribe-giver is a member of the Railway Board, and the arrested person is his close relative. Bansal will find it difficult to shake off suspicions that he was not aware of what was happening and, therefore, has a lot to explain.
M M Gurbaxani Bangalore
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