Bansal: Congress in further trouble
The discomfiture in the Congress was palpable when the CBI arrested a nephew of railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal. This relative had taken a hefty sum of money from a top railway official with the promise that he would be moved to a coveted slot in the Railway Board. The inference was that such a prize posting would be impossible to obtain without the railway minister sharing the loot.
In a political season, which is virtually the run-up to the next general election, even a whiff of a scandal is magnified if it can be laid at the door of the ruling establishment. This one is ideal from that perspective. Money has changed hands. The nephew is thought to be a poll manager of sorts for the minister. The saving grace is that there are no business links between the two, if Mr Bansal is to be given credence. Despite that, the circumstantial evidence looks strong.
There is one problem, though. It is not up to the railway minister alone to allocate Railway Board slots. To fill a vacancy in the board, his ministry sends up three names (generally seniority-based) from a certain level of officials and the PM picks one and forwards to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet for approval.
Mr Bansal’s reputation is also likely to be a relevant factor. He is widely thought to be a clean politician, whatever his nephew, a businessman, may have done.
Nonetheless, politics apart, the CBI, which has apparently caught Mr Bansal’s nephew with the tainted cash earned for promising to do a job, must look at every angle and interrogate the railway minister himself if there is the smallest suspicion that his scruples were subverted. The rest can then follow.
Besides the railway minister, the Union law minister has also been under a cloud. The resignation of both has been hotly demanded by the Opposition. (So has that of the PM.) The political climate is tense. Parliament has hardly functioned. The government has slid in the perception of many people, not just the Opposition. These are some of the reasons why the Congress core committee has deliberated on the Bansal issue for the past two days and sought to evaluate if his resignation was in order. But it should be reasonably clear that if the BJP is defeated in the Assembly election in Karnataka (polling was held on Sunday), and even if the Congress does only reasonably well, the political pressure on the Manmohan Singh government will ease. But if the BJP is through, the Congress might find itself in serious trouble.
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