On an evening in early October , the announcer at one of our premier news channels screamed 'greed' while describing the misdeeds of the latest victim of Arvind Kejriwal. Earlier that day, Mr Kejriwal had accused Robert Vadra of receiving favours from the real estate company DLF Ltd. In the next breath, the announcer explained that crony capitalism was at the root of the problem.

Book: India Grows At Night
Authour: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs. 599 pp 307

The way India governs itself has been a source of consternation. It does some things so right, yet there is so much we do wrong. Gurcharan Das's hypothesis is that most of it can be explained if you look at India as a strong society bound by a weak state.

It was the same question on everyone's lips. Aggrieved Suparna Prasad Dev asked, "If 50 policemen were at the scene, why didn't they act when a hundred Maruti workers brutally attacked managers and killed my husband?" When the police did finally act, it was too late. The factory was in flames, almost a hundred managers were bleeding, many injured seriously. Awanish Kumar Dev, head of human relations, was dead.

The arrest of Jagan Mohan Reddy, MP from Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh, is another reminder of a lesson that Indians have failed to learn so far. And this is that the root cause of corruption lies in the excessive discretionary authority in the hands of politicians and officials. The reforms in 1991 took away some of that discretion but many sectors of the economy are still unreformed.  Thus, scams happen in the dark alleys of unreformed sectors such as land transactions, mining, and government purchases. So, the answer to corruption may well lie in actions of the 1991 variety.