Old-timers will have no difficulty in recalling the `jeep scandal' which erupted when the inimitable V. K. Krishna Menon was the Indian High Commissioner in Britain. Curiously, the scandal related to purchase of jeeps for the Indian Army.
When Krishna Menon's detractors assailed him, the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, defended him by saying that the only scandal about it was that it had been called a scandal.
In the wake of the Chinese aggression in 1962, Nehru thundered in Parliament that not a blade of grass grew in those regions. However, V. K. Krishna Menon, then Defence Minister, stepped down from office but the Government continued in office. Even in the earlier infamous Mundhra LIC deal, the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, alone was asked to resign; the Government appointed the Justice Chagla Commission of Enquiry and chose to continue in office.
In the light of these standards of morality practised by the Congress party in the not too remote past, its call for the resignation of the Vajpayee Government on moral grounds is nothing but hypocrisy and duplicity put together.
The tactic of the Congress and other Opposition parties in obstructing and stalling the Parliament proceedings is only a foul means adopted to achieve what they cannot achieve by fair means, apart from being a grossly undemocratic way of rendering a duly-elected and constituted Parliament disfunctional.
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