Amazon has for years given preferential treatment to a small group of sellers on its India platform, publicly misrepresented its ties with the sellers and used them to circumvent increasingly tough foreign investment rules that affect e-commerce, internal company documents reviewed by Reuters show. The documents, dated between 2012 and 2019, are reported here for the first time. They provide an inside look at the cat-and-mouse game Amazon has played with the government, adjusting its corporate structures each time the government imposed new restrictions aimed at protecting small traders.