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विचारमञ्जरी (Vichāramañjarī)

    Same System, Same Result

    Posted on 4 mins

    Society India

    Table of Contents
    Rule-bending in India is usually explained as a cultural legacy of colonial rule or as a heritable trait. A simpler account fits the evidence better. The colonial system was inherited largely intact and still enforces its rules weakly, so the same behaviour stays rational for the same reasons today.

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    The claim

    Queues dissolve, contracts lean on personal ties, and rules are treated as suggestions. The usual explanation points to jugaad, the workaround as cleverness, and izzat, status that supposedly falls when you follow a rule that benefits only others. The description is largely accurate. The cause is misplaced. The behaviour does not come from a memory of colonial rule. It comes from the colonial system itself, which was inherited largely intact and is still running.

    A system that still runs

    The colonial state was built to extract revenue and keep order, and its courts, police and codes served those ends. Independent India kept most of that machinery. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Evidence Act of 1872 stayed in force until July 2024 (Verdictum, 2024), and colonial land-revenue arrangements shaped district outcomes for decades after independence (Banerjee and Iyer, 2005). Enforcement remains weak. In the last Doing Business report (2020), India ranked 163rd of 190 on enforcing contracts, with 1,445 days to resolve a commercial dispute (Government of India, 2020). In July 2026 about 5.64 crore cases were pending across Indian courts (PTI, 2026).

    Why bending the rules is rational

    A queue is a contract among strangers: I wait if you wait. It holds only when breaking it costs something. If a few people always step out and nothing happens, those who stay pay the price of waiting and get nothing back, so leaving the line is the rational move. Prestige need not enter into it. Business follows the same logic. Where courts are slow, trust stays low.

    Online games offer a comparison. On a server where players may attack each other freely, everyone plays defensively, and nobody blames the players’ nature. The server’s rules explain the play.

    The evidence agrees. The same person queues at a supervised counter and skips the line at an unsupervised one. In a 23-country experiment, students from countries where corruption, tax evasion and political fraud are more common reported higher die rolls, which paid more, so cheating was more common (Gächter and Schulz, 2016). And colonial history is not destiny. Singapore, a former British colony, built strong enforcement within a generation or two.

    The leap to biology

    A fixed cultural trait invites a further question, which is where it is stored. The answer on offer is DNA, and the step is unsupported. Differences in gene frequency between populations say nothing about social behaviour, and most human genetic variation lies within populations rather than between them (Rosenberg et al., 2002). The move also has a pedigree. Herbert Risley, who led the 1901 census of India, linked caste rank to nose measurements (Risley, 1908). Technical vocabulary again lends a conclusion settled in advance the look of rigour.

    Such explanations travel because audiences keep the verdict and forget the argument, and “civic sense” can serve as a euphemism for “it is in the blood”. The institutional account is less dramatic, but it can be tested, and it points to remedies: faster courts, accountable policing, consistent consequences for small violations. Change the system and the incentives change. Colonialism matters here because its design still runs. It did not change anyone’s nature.

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