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Ever since 2014, when the blissful era of Amrit Kaal began, it is said that the nation has been spared the shame and disgrace of corruption in high places. Of course, this is not because there has been no corruption or that India has become bharastachar-mukt (corruption-free).

We simply do not notice corruption, we do not recognise corruption, we do not report corruption. No reports, no corruption. No intrepid editors, no crusading anchors. And, we do not allow auditors like Vinod Rai to take liberties with our national gullibility.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Still, curiously enough, anyone reading newspapers (even the complicit and compromised ones) can easily read between the lines and connect the dots to figure out the pattern behind the infringements, embezzlements, short-changing, underhandedness, and other unholy crimes all around us.

Take, for example, the July 3, 2026 Delhi edition of The Times of India. Now, this is one of the most read – and most responsible – national newspapers. Neither its owners nor its editors (whomsoever they may be) are hostile to the Modi government. It is a newspaper that by no stretch of imagination can be dubbed as ‘subversive’ or ‘radical’.

So let us take an inventory of a few news items in the July 3 edition of TOI.

Exhibit no. 1: ‘Ayodhya trust not answerable to government, MHA told CIC last year’.

The story tells us that the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust is accountable to neither the Union nor Uttar Pradesh government, a curious oddity in these times of the totalising state. Even Kafka would be bewildered.

Here is a body of trustees who in their collective wisdom put together an arrangement for collecting and accounting donations to the Ram temple.........

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