Back into history

Nearly 94 years after the Jallianwalla Bagh outrage British Prime Minster David Cameron felt deeply shameful but stopped short of tendering a public apology. Mr Cameron, who is the first democratically-elected British Prime Minister to visit the 1919 massacre site, knelt to pay tribute to the Jallianwalla Bagh martyrs. It was certainly a good gesture, but if Mr Cameron was unable to to tender an apology what was the need to remember one of the darkest episodes of the British Raj Anandambal Subbu Navi Mumbai

*** Escape route During the 1980s-90s, when the then Congress government found itself in the Bofors quagmire, a parliamentary committee was appointed to thoroughly “investigate” the matter. Two decades later, the Congress-led UPA government is embroiled in yet another defence deal, this time related to the purchase of helicopters for VIP transport. If the Congress wants to wriggle out of this situation by adopting an approach similar to that during Bofors, it will mean another parliamentary committee in the offing, which can easily take about a year to submit its report, by which time a new Lok Sabha would already have been constituted. And, public memory being short, in the course of that time everything would have been forgiven and forgotten. Arun Malankar Mumbai

*** Bandhs irk public The two-day nationwide strike on February 20-21 paralysed life in Delhi as autorickshaws went off the roads and office-goers struggled to commute to work in overcrowded DTC buses and Metro trains. The strike may have been called by trade unions in good faith to protest against the anti-people policies of the UPA government, but ironically, it was the common man who was most affected. At the end of the day, it is the public that has to bear the brunt of such strikes. Shraddha Mahata Via email