The period between 2008 and 2012 produced a density of major corruption revelations in India that overwhelmed the public's ability to track them simultaneously. The 2G spectrum scandal, the Commonwealth Games contracting scandal, the Adarsh Housing Society scandal, the Karnataka mining scandal, the coal block allocations, the Radia tapes, the Uttar Pradesh food grain scandal — each was enormous by the standards of any previous Indian corruption reporting, and they arrived in such rapid succession that the outrage they individually merited was dissipated by the pace of revelation.

The 2G spectrum scandal was the largest in quantified terms. The Comptroller and Auditor General's estimate that the underpricing of spectrum licenses had cost the government ₹1.76 lakh crore — a number so large that it required journalistic translation into USD to communicate its scale — immediately became the defining number of the scandal debate, even as the methodology behind the estimate was contested by economists who argued it was not a loss but an opportunity cost.

The Commonwealth Games contracting produced images — the stadium roof collapse, the athletes' village declared uninhabitable — that communicated the consequences of corruption in terms that accounting figures do not. The money had not just disappeared; it had produced defective infrastructure for an international event that India had positioned as a showcase for its emergence as a global power.

What the scandals collectively produced was Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption movement, which mobilized in 2011 on a scale that surprised both the political establishment and the professional advocates who had been working on anti-corruption issues for decades. The breadth of the public response — across class, region, and age — suggested that the density of the preceding years' revelations had created a cumulative anger that required only a catalyst to express itself.