Of all the phrases India has given the English language, “to prepone” is perhaps the best. It means to bring an event back earlier in time, or the opposite of “to postpone”. Preponement is at the heart of new and devastating legal judgement on India’s gory 2G telecoms scandal

OF all the phrases India has given the English language, “to prepone” is perhaps the best. It means to bring an event back earlier in time, or the opposite of “to postpone”. Preponement is at the heart of new and devastating legal judgement just issued on India's gory 2G telecoms scandal. Already a minister was in jail, awaiting trial for corruption and the government's reputation had been battered. On February 2nd the supreme court went further and cancelled 122 of the relevant mobile licences which were granted dubiously in 2008. Its ruling throws part of the industry into chaos and casts dreadful light both on the workings of India's government and on the prime minister.

As Kevin Bacon in "A Few Good Men" might have put it, these are the facts of the case and they are undisputed: in 2007 a large number of applications for valuable new mobile licences had been received by the telecoms ministry from both existing operators and newcomers. On September 24th 2007, apparently worried about the volume of submissions, the telecoms ministry announced a deadline for further applications to be made by October 1st. About two thirds of the applications received were made in the subsequent resulting rush.

The government machine then pondered how to dole out licences, including whether auctions were best. By November, the telecoms ministry decided to use first-come-first-served, the choice of the lobotomised or the crooked. It didn't announce this in public, though, in order that favoured applicants who were in the know had time to spruce up their paperwork. When it did make public its approach in January, it arbitrarily preponed the original cut-off to September 25th. The retrospective change scuppered lots of legitimate applications. As the court said, there is “no room for doubt that everything was stage managed.” Soon after the licences were handed out, two of the winners, who had no experience of mobile telecoms, sold stakes in their licences to foreigners at prices that implied they'd made $1.3 billion of instant profits, based on calculations from figures in the court's judgement.

The scale of the deceit was already widely known in India. But the judgement is damaging. It reveals the pitiful state of government. There is arrogance—companies are told to report within 45 minutes to a ministry, that, if it is like all others, routinely make visitors wait hours. It is comically easy to escape scrutiny: to avoid its critics in the government the telecoms ministry postponed a meeting with them and announced its final decision before the rescheduled date. Proposals float around officials attracting only anodyne comment and evasion: asked for its view on how to allocate licences, the Attorney General lists three methodologies, then added a fourth: “any other better approach”. Finally there is Manmohan Singh, the prime minister. On November 2nd he wrote to the telecoms minister requesting, in cringingly meek terms, that the process be transparent and fair. Within a few hours the minister had replied, batting these objections aside.

The revoked licences account for 5-10% of India's subscribers and were concentrated among a handful of newer operators who were leading a price war. These newcomers may well go bust. The foreign operators who bought into them after the licence awards, including Telenor of Norway and Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates, deserve little sympathy. For the larger operators, including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone, the death of some small fry could be helpful. But the government will probably re-auction the illegally gained spectrum—which may either mean more newcomers or that the big firms must stump up yet more cash.

Spectrum allocation is already in a shambles. The 3G airwaves auctioned by the government in 2010 are a case in point. No single operator has a pan-Indian 3G network; each has a patchwork of coverage. Now the telecoms ministry is trying to ban firms from piggybacking off each others' 3G networks to fill in their blank spots. If they succeed India will be a place where it is impossible to use one mobile subscription to enjoy 3G anywhere in the country. Even without corruption, the machine is perfectly capable of making bad decisions.

At least India's supreme court is not messing around. Next the legal system will consider the case of the former telecoms minister at the heart of the scandal, in a case which could yet implicate other figures in the government. Hopefully the judges will, as an Indian might put it, “do the needful”.