Traveling around India, I often found that different parts of the country took a perverse kind of pride in the ingenious and questionable practices of their own local business elite. Bankers in Mumbai held a sneaking appreciation for financial shenanigans, for instance, while in Uttar Pradesh the finesse with which politicians ripped off welfare projects was often deplored and quietly admired in equal measure. But it was Andhra Pradesh, with its sophisticated patronage-based politics and billionaire Andhrapreneur tycoons, that represented perhaps India’s most refined form of crony capitalism,
...more
