The old Roman standard — that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, that proximity to power demands not just actual probity but the appearance of it — has been formally retired from Indian political discourse. The retirement was gradual, accomplished not by declaration but by the sheer accumulation of scandals that have made holding everyone in the political ecosystem to such a standard seem both naive and selectively applied.

The 2G spectrum allocation scandal, which emerged in its full dimensions in 2010 with the Comptroller and Auditor General's report estimating losses of ₹1.76 lakh crore to the exchequer, was the proximate occasion for this reflection. The scale of the alleged irregularity — the preferential allocation of mobile spectrum licenses at prices far below market value, with the benefiting companies subsequently selling their stakes at enormous profit — was difficult to process in ordinary terms.

But the 2G scam was not anomalous. It arrived alongside the Commonwealth Games corruption disclosures, the Adarsh Housing Society scandal in Maharashtra, the Radia tapes revelations about the nexus between corporate lobbyists, media figures, and political power. The year 2010 felt, to many Indian observers, like a sudden X-ray of a system that had always been this way but had simply never been so comprehensively photographed.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's position through all of this was characteristically awkward — personally incorruptible by most accounts, presiding over a government that was emphatically not. Caesar's probity, it turned out, was insufficient cover when the household around him was visibly enriching itself.

The public patience for the gap between principle and practice was visibly thinning. That patience would take its eventual form in the 2011 Anna Hazare movement, which arrived directly from the accumulated frustration of a year like 2010.