For the Comaroffs criminality has become a global idiom for social and economic life. Here, eleven case studies of criminal markets in India (Harriss-White and Michelutti, 2019) are found to support the Comaroffs’ global model in which state privatization generates contested jurisdictions and plural sovereignties. But distinctively Indian characteristics of criminal markets are also found. As suggested by Jha, these are preconditions for the funding of electoral democratic politics. The recent history of riverbed sand markets in Tamil Nadu on which urbanization and infrastructure depend reveals the capture and complicity of all levels of the revenue and regulative bureaucracy and of entire party political hierarchies. Profits and tribute resulting from rapid technological aggrandizement, the formation of regional monopolies, and of mafianized cartels in sand are the object of both competition and collusion. Resistance expressed through PIL results in un-enforced judicial decisions. Tamil Nadu’s famed populism coexists with predatory, pork barrel politics. The implications of criminalized sand markets for theories of actually existing markets and institutional change are discussed.