In 2011, a set of labels was attached to one man: “silent,” “weak,” “complicit.” They were politically useful then. 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 has 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 highest court in the land has, in effect, restored the honour of the man who was turned into the symbol of India’s “corruption.” That matters because the political story that followed in 2014 was built around the claim that his government represented a rotting ancient regime that had to be swept away.
So we should revisit not only what happened then, but how India was persuaded to remember it.
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 did not disappear, but evolved — becoming more centralised, more opaque, more institutionalised and far harder to detect?
When the movement peaked in 2011-12, it was not merely a protest. It was a cultural carnival. Breathless television anchors amplified and orchestrated the outrage. A moral emergency was constructed around a simple belief: a shadowy political elite was stealing the country’s future.
Night after night, the same story was repeated. Under Manmohan Singh, we were told, India had witnessed the most corrupt government in its history. 2G and coal were presented not as allegations awaiting adjudication, but as established facts of theft. “Lakhs of crores” had supposedly vanished. CAG estimates were treated as unquestionable proof.
Dr Manmohan Singh was transformed into the symbol of this decay; the UPA chairperson became the Machiavellian puppeteer behind it. The details mattered less. The verdict had already been delivered:
This government was corrupt. The system was rotten. Someone had to cleanse it.
That is how a “corruption” story became a political story.
The public was given a villain, a moral vocabulary and, eventually, a vehicle for redemption: a supposedly Gandhian figure in a white cap promising to cleanse the system. By Ramlila Maidan, the presumption of guilt had become national common sense. The question was no longer whether the old establishment was corrupt, but what would replace it.
In 2014, the replacement arrived promising to end corruption, restore transparency and clean up political life.
But almost immediately, the architecture of Indian political finance began to change.
Demonetisation rendered 86 per cent of the currency in circulation invalid overnight. It was sold as a surgical strike on “black money” — a national purification by fire. Millions stood in queues and endured enormous hardship because they were told the pain was the price of a cleaner India.
People believed they were taking part in a moral crusade. But since wiping out black money was only a jumla, we now know demonetisation was a ploy to disrupt the traditional informal system of political finance to the disadvantage of the opposition before a critical election cycle.
After disrupting the old system of political financing, something new had to be installed. That’s how the electoral bonds came into the picture.
In 2017, electoral bonds were introduced as a supposedly “cleaner” mechanism for political donations. Instead, they removed the obligation on parties to disclose electoral-bond contributions and permitted unlimited corporate donations.
Consider the irony.
The very thing the public had been taught to fear — corporate influence over politics — was now given the protection of state-mandated anonymity.
If India Against Corruption was the campaign that convinced the country the old product was toxic, electoral bonds were the premium replacement.
This is where our understanding of corruption needs to change.
We instinctively think of corruption as a minister taking a bribe or an official favouring a contractor. But the more dangerous possibility is that the rules themselves can be redesigned so that payment for access becomes legal, predictable and protected from scrutiny.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment striking down electoral bonds exposed precisely this problem. The Court found the scheme unconstitutional and struck down provisions enabling anonymous political funding. Subsequent disclosures showed that more than 15 of the 30 largest corporate donors had faced investigation by the ED, CBI or Income Tax Department.
That does not, by itself, establish a quid pro quo. But it raises an unavoidable democratic question:
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. It could now be corporate, institutional, legally structured and hidden behind the machinery of the state, almost like a subscription model for access to power.
Electoral bonds made the relationship between business and political power resemble a toll gate on a public highway: the road belongs to everyone, but a few control the booth. Money moves legally, the cost is absorbed into contracts and prices, and a small number of operators control the gate.
And as Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly highlighted, as wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, political money and political power concentrate alongside it. The BJP’s bank balance rising from around ₹150 crore to more than ₹10,000 crore is not merely a financial statistic. It is a window into how profoundly India’s political economy has changed.
Political money, however, is only one part of the transparency problem.
During Covid-19, PM CARES was created. It carries the Prime Minister’s name and the state emblem, solicits donations from citizens, PSUs and companies, and presents itself as a national emergency fund. Yet it is structured as a private trust, outside the routine audit of the CAG and the RTI obligations that apply to statutory funds.
Partial disclosures show substantial inflows. But the complete picture of who gave, how much was given and where the money ultimately went remains beyond ordinary public scrutiny.
The same question is visible at the state level.
In Madhya Pradesh, reporting based on government documents indicates that firms linked to Chief Minister Mohan Yadav’s extended family have acquired more than 250 acres in and around Ujjain since 2021, including 137 plots purchased after he took office in December 2023. Many are located along routes subsequently benefiting from road projects or land-use changes under the Ujjain Master Plan 2035.
The Chief Minister’s Office distinguishes his personal holdings from those of his relatives. That may be legally relevant. But the underlying pattern remains politically important: When people close to political power acquire land that subsequently benefits from public infrastructure and changes in land use, the public has every right to ask questions.
The story is no different in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, or other BJP-ruled states. And that is precisely why transparency is needed.
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 relentless, weaponised narrative while another was marketed as its cleansing alternative.
So the contradiction deserves to be confronted.
The old story told us that one man’s government represented the high point of national loot, and that its successor arrived as the cleansing force. But the Supreme Court, electoral-bond disclosures, State Bank of India data and land records have begun to reveal a far more complicated — and far more troubling — picture.
Corruption Against India
Perhaps the greatest failure of India Against Corruption was not simply that it failed to eliminate corruption. Perhaps it changed the political vocabulary of corruption while leaving its underlying machinery intact — and helped legitimise a system in which political and economic power could be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
The great Indian anti-corruption crusade promised to free the Indian state from corruption. Instead, it cleared the political ground for a more sophisticated form of it: institutionalised, centralised, legally sanitised and protected from scrutiny.
And this was not the first time this toolkit had been used.
We saw it before, during Bofors.
The Bofors controversy was used for years to malign the Congress leadership. An allegation was transformed into a political weapon; relentless repetition turned suspicion into public conviction; and a complex legal matter was reduced to a simple moral narrative about a corrupt Congress and a corrupt political establishment. The political verdict came long before the legal process had run its course.
Decades later, the same playbook returned with 2G and coal. Allegations became headlines, headlines became “scams”, and “scams” became proof of an entire government’s moral illegitimacy. The presumption of guilt was manufactured first; the legal process was left to catch up later.
The point is not that every allegation against the Congress was imaginary. The point is that allegations were repeatedly turned into political verdicts before the courts had spoken.
That is the real continuity between Bofors and India Against Corruption: not necessarily the facts of the individual cases, but the political technology used to turn allegations into certainties, certainties into outrage, and outrage into regime change.
And by the time the courts finally establish that the allegations do not hold, the damage is already done. Media and Social Media trials have already taken place, reputations have been destroyed, public memory has been rewritten, — and elections have already been won and lost.
The court may eventually clear a man. But it cannot so easily undo a decade of political propaganda.
That is why we need to revisit the story we were told in 2011. Because perhaps the question was never: Who was corrupt?
Perhaps the more important question is: Who benefited from convincing India that corruption had one face — and only one political solution?
Pawan Khera | Chairman, Congress media & publicity wing
(Views are personal)
