The Vyapam scam exposes how a weak state puts individuals above the law and institutions. Not just the powerful, but even the not-so-powerful can now cock a snook at the law and assume they can get away with it.

Even as the cacophony over the Vyapam ‘killer’ scam gets louder, sane people must ask themselves a basic question: why? It is perfectly all right to demand justice and send the corrupt and the guilty - both those who participated in the Vyapam examination scam and those who may be involved in bumping off inconvenient people who may know too much - but if we do not ask the deeper ‘why’ question, we would have missed another opportunity to fix the problem at the roots.

Why are so many people dying in Vyapam? What is so special about this examination-related corruption scandal that so many people are paying with their lives, and in full view of the media and the court of public opinion?

To me it is simply not credible to suggest that all this is happening because someone higher up is trying to silence people who know who did what in the scam. The fact is too many people knew too much – which means the scam was an open secret for years - and predates Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Moreover, even criminal minds do not continue bumping off people when the whole world is watching.

The only logical answer to the ‘why’ question may be this: the system has gone so rotten, that the state has become a semi-criminal enterprise, aided by the apathy and amorality of the less powerful and the powerless. I would also argue that we have ourselves - citizen and media - compromised so much with a criminal system, that we no longer have the moral authority to protest, never mind how much Arnab Goswami may yell and scream and hector on the TV screen. He is merely adding to the din by playing Cacofonix No 1.

We thought change was at hand with the exit of the corrupt UPA and the rise of a Narendra Modi, an Arvind Kejriwal and an Anna movement that preceded their rise. But the problem clearly is larger than both of them. And Anna certainly did not have all the answers. A Modi in Delhi can do little when the states are run by other powerful politicians, and a Kejriwal can do little if the centre is at loggerheads with him most of the time. Centre and states are paralysing each other, wrestling each other to a standstill while the corrupt system continues to squeeze us all.

The central message coming from the Vyapam scam - where despite hundreds of arrests, people are still dying - is that the law no longer matters. The state has become so weak, that individuals, both powerful and not-so-powerful ones, are able to ignore the law and suborn the system. The line separating state actors from criminals is now deeply blurred. Even if Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the Madhya Pradesh BJP fail to survive Vyapam, the corrupt system will. A weak state is custom-built for a criminal system to operate as a super-state.

The characteristics of a weak state are the following:

One, the law and institutions matter less than powerful individuals. Look around you: every political party is headed by a powerful personality, who dominates it solo.

Two, weak states use strong, anti-liberal laws to maintain order. India is nothing but a weak state run by draconian laws - from the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) to SC/ST laws to anti-dowry and anti-domestic violence laws to draconian black money control laws. You can go to jail under these laws even with very little evidence against you, and only the powerful can find a way around it.

Three, a weak state can coerce the citizen using a faceless, inflexible rulebook. Consider the case of Aadhaar, the unique ID system. With no law to back it or any guarantee about the privacy of your personal data, Aadhaar has been pushed all over India using the bureaucracy even though the Supreme Court has said it cannot be mandatory; if you protest, you won't get anywhere as the legal system is out-of-reach and expensive. A weak state can be tyrannical by indirectly empowering the babu at the last mile to play god with the citizen. The peon at the registrar's office, who denies you a registration for want of an Aadhaar, will, if you protest, simply tell you he is following rules. Your bank will keep exhorting you to link your accounts to Aadhaar. Reason: they don’t want to get into a tangle with their ministry bosses.

Four, a weak state can easily be taken over by criminal elements for those who threaten bodily harm to unprotected government officials, whistleblowers or the ordinary citizen will carry clout with everybody. The citizen no longer expects much help against criminals from the police; if your daughter is being threatened by local goons, you have a better chance of protecting her by paying the goon's boss than by filing a report with the police. Not only are the police compromised, but we simply do not have enough policemen to give us even a modicum of protection. This is why even when there is so much scrutiny of Vyapam, people are running scared. There are too many people who need protection, and no one can be sure if the people providing the protection are themselves compromised or not.

Five, more than the centre, it is our states that have become really criminalised. A Modi will be subjected to national and international scrutiny, but not a Akhilesh Yadav, a Mamata Banerjee, a Navin Patnaik, a J Jayalalithaa, or a Nitish Kumar. Move away from the big metros, where the big media are based, and you have jungle raj in most states. It's not just about Madhya Pradesh. Most state-level crimes everywhere go under the radar. At best they get local coverage, unless the rise in body count suddenly catches the national media's eye, as it did in the case of Vyapam. “Discovering scams” is also part of the system. Every political party runs its own unaccountable media, both to support a personality cult around the boss and to “unearth” scams that will target the ruling party. Once governments change, the system merely passes to other hands. This is how the media becomes a law unto itself, and is also a covert supporter of the system.

Six, the weak state is not just about the executive. It is about all institutions of the state, including the judiciary. Those who think the judiciary is the key to change will find only limited success. Ask yourself: why is it that even after so many Supreme Court-monitored investigations, nothing much has come to light in any scam? Also, how is it that so many Supreme Court judges find easy employment on various quasi-judicial bodies after retirement? Why is it that a Shanti Bhushan can openly allege that eight former chief justices were corrupt, but the court, far from hauling him up for contempt and attempt to intimidate the judiciary, merely shrugged and never inquired into it. Why is it that despite anecdotal evidence of judicial corruption, no judge has ever gone to jail? Why is the Supreme Court even now battling to retain the opaque collegiums system of judges appointing judges when the overwhelming vote of parliament and state legislatures was against it?

Clearly, a weak state is underpinned by a weak judiciary. The fact that it sometimes comes up with roaring judgments does not mean it is powerful enough to uphold the law unequivocally.

I don’t know how this can be reversed, but the tell-tale signs of a change will be the following: the police will be reformed and given functional autonomy with no political interference; the state will focus on governance and providing public goods (clean air, water, law and order, justice, economic reforms, infrastructure), and not private subsidies (oil, power and food subsidies to the undeserving); the judiciary will restrict itself to interpreting the law and not try to interfere in every other area of executive action (gleaning the Ganga or chasing black money is not its job); government reduces direct interface with the people by making some kinds of permissions automatic or through e-portals; policy-making is separated from running public enterprises; elections are publicly funded – among other things.

Till we start doing these things, India will continue to be a weak state.