In 2011, a set of labels was attached to one man: “silent,” “weak,” “complicit.” But today, they no longer withstand scrutiny.
More than a decade after a special court summoned Dr Manmohan Singh as an accused in the Talabira-II coal-block allocation case, the Supreme Court accepted the CBI’s closure reports and held that there was no “sufficient material or good reason” to register a corruption case against him.
The court has restored the honour of the man turned into the symbol of India’s “corruption”. That matters because the 2014 story claimed his government represented a rotting ancien regime that had to be swept away.
What did the India Against Corruption movement actually achieve?
We were told it was a movement to end corruption. But what if its deeper consequence was the opposite? What if corruption evolved — becoming more centralised, opaque, institutionalised and harder to detect?
When the movement peaked in 2011–12, television amplified a moral emergency: a political elite was stealing the country’s future. Under Manmohan Singh, India had witnessed its most corrupt government. 2G and coal became established facts of theft; “lakhs of crores” had vanished.
Dr Manmohan Singh became the symbol of decay; the UPA chairperson, the Machiavellian puppeteer. The verdict was delivered: This government was corrupt. The system was rotten. Someone had to cleanse it. That is how a “corruption” story became a political story.
In 2014, the replacement arrived promising to end corruption, restore transparency and clean up political life. But immediately, the architecture of Indian political finance began to change.
Demonetisation rendered 86 per cent of currency invalid overnight. It was sold as a surgical strike on “black money”. It was a ploy to disrupt the informal system of political finance to the disadvantage of the opposition.
In 2017, electoral bonds were introduced as a supposedly “cleaner” mechanism. Instead, they removed disclosure obligations and permitted unlimited corporate donations.
The more dangerous possibility is that rules themselves can be redesigned so payment for access becomes legal, predictable and protected from scrutiny.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment striking down electoral bonds exposed this problem. Disclosures showed that more than 15 of the 30 largest corporate donors had faced investigation by the ED, CBI or Income Tax Department.
What happens when political contributions, state power and commercial interests begin to overlap on such a scale?
Corruption had not necessarily been eradicated. It had been transformed. As Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly highlighted, as wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, political money and political power concentrate alongside it.
During COVID-19, PM CARES was created. It carries the Prime Minister’s name and state emblem, yet is structured as a private trust, outside CAG audit and RTI obligations. Who gave, how much and where the money went remains beyond scrutiny.
Reporting based on government documents indicates that firms linked to Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s extended family acquired more than 250 acres around Ujjain since 2021, including 137 plots after he took office. Many are along routes benefiting from road projects or land-use changes under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035. The Chief Minister’s Office distinguishes his holdings from relatives. But the public has every right to ask questions.
Old corruption was supposed to be dirty, cash-based, individual, and visible. The new corruption has become formal, institutional and legal — and therefore much harder to see.
The godi media will not lead this post-mortem. There is little incentive to examine how one political era was discredited through a weaponised narrative while another was marketed as its cleansing alternative.
Corruption Against India
Perhaps the greatest failure of India Against Corruption was that it changed the political vocabulary of corruption while leaving its machinery intact — and helped legitimise a system in which political and economic power could be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
We saw it before, during Bofors. An allegation became a political weapon; repetition turned suspicion into public conviction. The verdict came first.
Decades later, the same playbook returned with 2G and coal. Allegations became headlines, headlines became “scams”, and “scams” became proof of a government’s moral illegitimacy. The presumption of guilt was manufactured first; the legal process followed.
The point is not that every allegation against Congress was imaginary, but that allegations became political verdicts before courts had spoken.
That is the real continuity between Bofors and India Against Corruption: not necessarily the facts, but the political technology used to turn allegations into certainties, certainties into outrage, and outrage into regime change.
By the time courts establish that allegations do not hold, the damage is already done. Media and Social Media trials have taken place, reputations destroyed, public memory rewritten, elections won and lost. Who benefited from convincing India that corruption had one face — and only one political solution?
Pawan Khera
Chairman, Congress media & publicity wing
