Time magazine included India’s 2G spectrum allocation scam in its list of “Top 10 abuses of power”. Indeed, in a country where corruption allegations are a dime a dozen, the 2G scam, as it was popularly known, stood head and shoulders above the rest. For one, there was the sheer scale of the loss alleged. The Comptroller and Auditor general of India put out the upper limit of Rs 1.76 lakh crore. That’s 176 followed by 10 zeroes – Rs 17,60,00,00,00,000. A lot of money. The case created a political and economic earthquake. In 2012, the Supreme Court cancelled 122 spectrum licenses issued to telecom operators, at one stroke redrawing India’s telecom industry. According to one estimate, the verdict had an impact on 5.3 crore phone connections. Politically, the scam became a totem for the Congress’ alleged corruption. The alleged scam was the fuel for the India Against Corruption movement led by Anna Hazare and was frequently invoked by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the lead up to the 2014 Lok Sabha election. But there was one earthquake more to come. On Thursday, a special court presided over by Justice OP Saini, said that for all the brouhaha, there simply was no scam. Every one of the accused people in the case was acquitted. Everybody was going by “public perception created by rumour, gossip and speculation”, the court ruled. “Some people created a scam by artfully arranging a few selected facts and exaggerating things beyond recognition to astronomical levels.” Yet, this still raises the question: if all there was to it was “rumour, gossip and speculation”, why did the Supreme Court in 2012 cancel 122 licences, drastically affecting the telecom industry? In 2012, the Supreme Court was responding to a Public Interest Litigation filed by a host of activists in order to answer questions about whether the government had a right to distribute natural resources in a manner that was not “fair and transparent” in accordance with the “fundamentals of the equality clause enshrined in the Constitution”. It also looked closely at the method in which the 2G spectrum was allocated. A specific question the Supreme Court looked at was whether A Raja, then Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology, had acted in order to “favour some of the applicants”. In its order, the court was scathing when commenting on Raja’s conduct. “The material produced before the Court shows that the Minister of C&IT wanted to favour some companies at the cost of the Public Exchequer,” the order read. It also said, Raja “virtually gifted away the important national asset at throw away prices”. For the court, Raja’s corruption was proved by the actions of the companies who had been given licences. “This becomes clear from the fact that soon after obtaining the licences, some of the beneficiaries off-loaded their stakes to others, in the name of transfer of equity or infusion of fresh capital by foreign companies, and thereby made huge profits.”