On April 26, when law minister Ashwani Kumar said he was innocent, despite having seen the CBI’s draft report on the coal blocks allocation bound for submission in the supreme court, he was not lying.

At a meeting of the UPA the same day, moments after CBI director Ranjit Sinha submitted an affidavit in the supreme court saying the draft was shown to Kumar and senior officers of the prime minister's office (PMO) and the coal ministry, he reportedly said he did no wrong. He allegedly did not offer to resign and said it is his job, as the government's law officer, to provide legal inputs.

"There's no case against the coal ministry or law ministry," he reportedly said (read more here).

Officially, he said an amalgam of the same stuff: "I have done no wrong, the truth will prevail.”

Exactly four days on, as the supreme court slammed the CBI just before Tuesday noon for showing the draft report to the government, saying that the action has “shaken the entire process”, the law minister might still stand his ground. “I have done no wrong,” Kumar could well say, though he must not reiterate the latter part of his earlier statement. For, though truth has prevailed, as it invariably always does, it might not be to the law minister’s liking. Or for that matter any other attendee in that UPA meeting on April 26, chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi and attended, among others, by prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Kumar has done no wrong not because he did not see the draft report — or vet it, as CBI chief Ranjit Sinha has told the apex court, or correct its typos or grammar, as the government claims. He, of course, was wrong on that front, as the SC has observed, “Our first exercise will be to liberate the CBI from political interference.... You don't need to take instructions from political masters," the court told the CBI’s counsel.

He did no wrong because he did not examine, or vet, the draft to save his backside. He did to save the rear of his own “political masters”, to borrow the phrase from the supreme court bench.

To borrow from the court’s observation again, there is a need to “liberate” all ministries from “political interference”.

And in UPA-II, that begins with the prime minister’s office. While the PM might claim — and, in absence of evidence to the contrary, rightly so — he is personally spick and span, and prefers and exhibits a peculiar supreme hygiene in matters pecuniary, and his law minister might claim he did no wrong, there was a huge wrong, a big wrong done somewhere, by someone. And it has got everything to do with trust.

Or the lack of it — a brazen mistrust and distrust of all things not in tandem with the hand, an unabashed aversion for minding the rules, and a wicked inclination to bend the hand that minds the rules.

In the end it boils down to the three adjectives: brazen, unabashed, and wicked. So both Ashwani Kumar and Manmohan Singh might not have, in a way, done any wrong. But both are wrong by their very presence in the cabinet — their offices’ brazen, unabashed and wicked predilection for bending it like UPA. Time for truth to prevail and exit for both you gentlemen, Mr Kumar.