If one has to make a bisection of Indian population, it consists of either those people who can afford to disregard the law, and those to whom law is a symbol of their own oppression. In both cases, the result is lawlessness.
You can break the law, and then escape the punishment by having ``contacts'' and ``sources''. You can break the law and pay a bribe to someone to escape harassment.
But those who are unable to do any of the above, does one think that they would respect the law? They would hate it. They are only unable to overpower it, that does not mean they want to be lawful. At any given opportunity, their lawlessness would surface. Where there is no fear of prosecution, nobody can induce them to be law-abiding.
To be law-abiding is an admission of one's weakness in India. The respectable never follow the law. It is evident all around oneself. The ones who follow the law are inevitably the very poor and the helpless. So, what is the message that one gets in such an environment?
It is an environment where you will waste your time, energy and money if you try to be law-abiding. When your competitors in industry don't have to pay their electricity bills because they manage to bribe the officials, you would only be a fool to expect that you can gain market share from them by honest means. When you are standing at a red traffic light, and everybody is whizzing past you blaring their horns at you for your obtuseness to be in the way, and with the traffic cop looking on at the whole affair non-chalantly, you would not wait for the green light next time, I can assure you. And perhaps then, you will be caught by the cop!
There are examples too many to list here. When everybody is operating illegal pumps in their homes to suck water from the municipal water pipes, you would be a fool to expect a drop of it coming your way without an illegal pump of your own. When students are getting engineering degrees just by paying a specified sum of money, what kind of student would still attach any value to four years of distress to get that same piece of paper, especially when he is not taught anything of value at the institute.
Where law is not enforced consistently, across all sections of society and at all times, one loses respect for it. Then one only seeks means of escaping from its clutches.
When the government is perceived as incompetent and self-serving, it is not unnatural that the common man has no respect left for laws which seem to have been made only to further the class division.
India will never be a country of law-abiding citizens unless the laws are enforced upon everybody without regard to his position and authority. Unless that happens, the anarchy will only increase.
People will continue to do as they please (if they can). They will keep their homes clean and not mind at all if the walls of the city are being defaced, if crowds are fighting over cinema tickets, if people throw garbage out of their train windows...It will not make a difference to them if forests are uprooted, if a new dam displaces a few lakh villagers, if the rivers are getting polluted.
Myopic and narrow self-interest is the cause and the effect of a lawless society and an ugly country.