It also went the other way round, as politicians set themselves up in business and gifted contracts and favors to their own operations. Sometimes this happened openly. More often the process was clandestine, with a politician’s ultimate control disguised via benami chains of relatives or associates. Common in southern India, these arrangements soon spread to New Delhi, as politicians realized that corruption’s grandest profits were often to be made by owning businesses and then fiddling the rules to help them grow.
