IN acquitting former Telecom minister, A Raja, Ms Kanimozhi and all other accused in the “2G scam”, the Special CBI court at Patiala House has introduced a spicy flavour to the national political curry. To the extent, 2G had become emblematic of a supposedly corrupt government and a broken down political economy, the Special CBI court verdict is bound to energise the discredited UPA crowd, as also take the bite out of PM Modi’s messianic proclamations against the corrupt. Coming close on the heels of an honourable electoral draw in Gujarat, the political equations are poised to be redefined. Suddenly, the sinners are looking less than sinners and the saints no longer come across so saintly.The CBI has done a shoddy job but it will find its institutional arm twisted to ensure that an appeal got filed against the Special Court’s judgment. Judge Saini’s magisterial dismissal of the prosecution case as nothing more than “rumour, gossip and speculation” goes to the very heart of the infirmities that have come to overload our public institutions. His elaboration that “public perception has no place in judicial proceedings” is a bracing slap across the face of many in superior judiciary who tend to work “national conscience” and similar perceptual constructs into their judicial reasoning.A war of words has predictably broken out between the UPA and the NDA partisans and practitioners over the verdict and its political ramifications. That war among politicians will continue and only intensify till 2019. But there are significant lessons for all those who preside over our institutions. The former CAG, Vinod Rai, ought to be the most chastened man in India. His twisted logic produced a figure of Rs 1.76 trillion loss to the national exchequer. This was only a notional loss but it lodged itself in the national imagination as an act of ethical wrong-doing on a gigantic scale. Arguably, the process was abused by the politician-bureaucratic axis, but Vinod Rai too did not play by the book. He subjected the polity to great convulsions; in the process, the nation got a bad name globally, resulting in huge — unquantifiable — losses in terms of businesses and investment withheld. Many more reputations and myths would come unravelling.