Dear government ministers, Citizens are numbed. On the evening of June 2, as passengers settled down for a train journey ahead, death came suddenly. Within minutes, hundreds perished in the Balasore accident. Parents lost children, families lost breadwinners. A notebook found on the railway tracks at Balasore contained a poem. It read: “Small clouds create rain, small tales create love. ” We will never know who this nameless poet on the train was, dreaming of rain and love. A doll was found too, its arms ripped off. A gift? Or being carried by a child? We’ll never know.
There is a clamour for the resignation of the railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. Lal Bahadur Shastri is being invoked, who, in an undoubted act of constitutional morality, resignedas railway minister after a train accident in Tamil Nadu in 1956. But did rail accidents stop after Shastri quit his post?
