Ms Smriti Irani, the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, might have, out of curiosity, emotion or to avoid personal embarrassment, declared herself in her affidavit to the Election Commission in 2004, a graduate from Delhi University’s School of Correspondence in 1996. She must have realised the blunder. Her conscious must have worried her. The realisation of her fault and the guilt and repentance is a virtue, and not a deliberate intention to play foul. In her subsequent affidavits in 2011 and 2014, she did say that her highest education qualification was BCom part two, from the DU School of Correspondence. She deserves to be excused because she subsequently spoke the truth.