A decade ago, the headlines about India were all about scandals tumbling out of the closet of the Congress Party-led coalition that governed the country then. Everyone except the scholarly Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a handful of others, it seemed, had their hand in the cookie jar one way or the other. Headlines screamed government paralysis.

But importantly, there was a cookie jar. The services and consumption-led economy was expanding at a fast clip, foreign direct investments continued to flow in and the unemployment situation did not seem so dire. Communal relations were stable. It helped that the country was run by a Sikh premier who took orders from a Roman Catholic party-and-coalition chief, and a Muslim was vice-president.