Optimistic Indian nationalists expected that freedom from British rule would bring clean governance. These hopes had largely died out by the time Indira Gandhi took power in the 1960s. So common was corruption under the Licence Raj that it even became a mainstay of newspaper horoscopes. ‘All round improvements but not without strings,’ the Hindustan Times warned Virgos in 1985, before adding: ‘If paying a bribe to anyone, see that the job is done.’
