It is not that the buying of parliamentary votes has been a secret; the 1993 case involving Buta Singh of the Congress paying four MPs of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (to win their support when the Narasimha Rao government faced a no-confidence vote) is fully documented, as is the extraordinary Supreme Court verdict that let the MPs go unpunished, and indeed declared innocent of the charge of corruption. Nor is it a secret that the political parties, without exception, function on the basis of unaccounted money received from business houses, who, even when they offer to pay by cheque, are asked to pay in cash instead. All MPs spend more than the stipulated limits on their election campaigns, as none other than Atal Bihari Vajpayee bemoaned a quarter century ago. In a political and electoral system manifestly oiled by unaccounted money, and which has a history of buying votes when the government was nervous about losing a confidence motion, it is not the fact of pay-offs that causes shock and dismay. Rather, it is the driving home to all citizens of what they may have been only dimly conscious of. And implicit in the crossing of that threshold of consciousness is the most serious threat to India's political system.

It is possible that people acting on the ruling alliance's behalf have been guilty of making pay-offs, as alleged by three BJP MPs, to buy their abstention on the trust vote. After all, there has been enough talk of the UPA's confidence that many BJP members will abstain from voting, on top of which it has been said that taped evidence of the attempt at bribery has been given to the Speaker. The full facts will be known in due course, and the most important thing that has to be ensured is that the guilty are brought to book. There is nothing that breeds cynicism more than the knowledge that those who have been exposed as guilty parties get away scot free. In that sense, this is a vital test of the Indian system that now lies ahead.

India's entire political class has to treat this as a warning, that if it does not reform the practice of politics and remove the role of unaccounted money, then the system as a whole is being placed at risk. The country has already seen evidence of the then BJP president accepting money, those associated with the then defence minister accepting money from people posing as arms sales agents, and of sundry MPs taking cash for asking questions in Parliament. In that sense, the attempt to buy three BJP MPs fits into a pattern, and the red signals are flashing loud and clear. The political class and the country as a whole ignore them at their peril.