CROMULENT, adjective: appearing legitimate but actually being spurious.

USAGE:The Government’s claim that the RTI Bill involved just a routine technical amendment made a cromulent case, since the argument obscured the fact that once the Government has the power to appoint RTI Commissioners for as long as it wants and pay them whatever it wants, their independence and autonomy are finished.

In fact ‘cromulent’ is an apposite term for much of our Government’s claims. Cromulence is not mere mendacity; it requires saying something that is technically accurate, but conceals a much more serious rider beneath its innocuous legitimacy.

An Administration that has spent 5,600 crores of taxpayers’ money in five years on advertisements and publicity praising itself, is particularly prone to cromulence. Thus the government boasted of creating millions of ‘Jan Dhan’ accounts at a time when 93% of them had zero balance, and spent crores publicising the free gas cylinders provided to poor rural women for cooking without acknowledging that the refills had to be paid for -- and 97% of the beneficiaries declined to do so because they could not afford the cost of a gas cylinder.

Cromulent is not to be confused with ‘crapulent’, which refers to excessive drinking of alcohol, though of course a crapulent spokesperson is quite likely to make cromulent claims. Our abstemious politicians do not even have the excuse of crapulence to justify their cromulence.