Over the next few years Quraishi kept a list of the artful ways parties tried to buy votes. ‘They were all very crafty,’ he said. ‘Some would hand out money, others held fake weddings to entertain villagers with food and liquor, or handed out mobile phones, or SUVs, or saris, or jobs, or almost anything you can think of.’ His autobiography included a compendium of forty or so methods, from cash funnelled through village headmen, to gifts of solar lamps, narcotics, cows or manure.
