From 50 Years Ago: Beware of Pity.

The adjournment of the Parliament session must have come to at least a few important persons as a welcome respite and relief. It is intriguing to speculate what could have occurred in Parliament even though the Opposition is numerically outnumbered and consists of rather disjointed groups, disgruntled individuals and lone wolves. Even this obviously inadequate Opposition made itself felt on the occasion of the debate on the activities of the Life Insurance Corporation. Before we turn to the sorry matter of the “Mundhra Scandal” it is interesting to regard those happenings as a study in parliamentary practice...The Insurance Corporation controversy proved the effectiveness of the independent member, the alertness and opportunism of the Opposition members and what is also very important, the ability of responsibile men and women within the ruling party to be moved by a suf ficient ly large issue, even if it nearly means exposing some weakness within the conglomeration of individuals and institutions which passes by the name of Government...

It is quite likely t hat by t he t ime t he Budget session comes round, it will not be possible to – shall we say – keep the flame alive in the affair of the LIC investments. It was a strange coincidence that the emblem of the Corporation has got affinities with the title of the manifesto of the ‘ginger group’ within the Congress. The issue on the Mundhra investments should not be allowed either to be blurred or forgotten. The plaint is against the method and manner in which the transactions were conducted. No reasonable person can quarrel with the Corporation for losing money in t he share market (alt hough it is ver y unwise of the spokesmen of the Corporation to suggest “what is t he loss of a crore when we have over two hundred crores?”). The heart of the matter is that it is felt that something shady and surreptitious took place in June, and the truth is only known to a few persons.