New Delhi: The streets have become a stage for keeping democracy alive, the ballot box a battleground, the internet a factory of manufactured realities, and the stock market a test of faith and patience. This week, international media followed India across all four arenas.
The Wall Street Journal tracked young protesters putting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on the ‘defensive’, while the Financial Times questioned a democracy’s critical relationship with its voters. The New York Times followed a money trail from India to a US Senate race, and FT turned to Mukesh Ambani’s bid to take Jio Platforms public in what could be India’s biggest IPO.
“I know that I can be picked up anytime tonight or tomorrow,” Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), said before a protest over voting rights.
The next day, police detained Dipke. Activist Neha Bora was also taken into custody. Both were later released, but the confrontation captured the defiance at the heart of the youth-led protests that Tripti Lahiri and Krishna Pokharel, reporting for The Wall Street Journal, say have put Modi’s government on the ‘defensive’. The immediate flashpoint is the revision of electoral rolls, which has removed around 130 million names from draft lists.
“The government seemed to be scared of nothing and no one,” Brown University political scientist Ashutosh Varshney tells the publication. “Now it seems to scare young people.” The report describes a government facing a challenge from a section of voters once regarded as an important source of support for the BJP.
“India’s Democracy Once Went Looking for Voters. Not Any More.” That is the central argument of a Financial Times opinion piece by Milan Vaishnav, who examines the implications of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
After Independence, India extended voting rights to all adult citizens. The state took responsibility for enrolling voters, conducting house-to-house surveys across “glaciers, deserts and jungles”. Vaishnav argues that the SIR marks a departure by shifting the burden of proving eligibility from the State to individual voters.
West Bengal offers a troubling illustration. More than nine million names were removed ahead of its April 2026 election. Of the 2.7 million people whose records were flagged for discrepancies, more than 80 percent appealed, but only 1,607 were reinstated in time to vote. Vaishnav notes that 93 percent of decided appeals resulted in reinstatement. His warning goes beyond administrative errors to the credibility of the Election Commission itself. A country that once went to extraordinary paths to ensure all citizens could vote, a country where ECI’s motto is “No voter to be left behind” is “now busy placing new obstacles in their way”.
A woman introducing herself as Darlene from Detroit had a familiar message for American voters: “Definitely affordability,” she said. “You’ve got to make sure people can make a living.” The videos featuring her and others discussing American politics looked like ordinary street-level campaign content.
Steven Lee Myers, reporting for The New York Times, finds that accounts based largely in India were helping distribute such videos ahead of a closely contested Democratic Senate primary in Michigan.
At least three dozen such videos are circulating across platforms including X, Facebook, Threads and Instagram, collectively attracting millions of views. Researchers tracking disinformation identified accounts that were paid to spread the clips, with some posts earning between $1 and $5 per thousand views.
Mumbai-based content creator Ayush Jain tells NYT that he earned about $15 for each of the 40 posts published through accounts he controlled. The company that paid him, Lumina Clippers, was run by Portugal-based Irishman Rhys McKay, who acknowledged the company’s role in distributing the videos but declined to identify its client. The ultimate source of the money remains unclear, and the report does not establish that either candidate’s campaign commissioned the operation.
Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center for Justice describes the wider problem as an information ecosystem in which the lines between genuine and dubious sources are increasingly blurred. “The idea that the ordinary voter or consumer of information can always tell the difference,” he says, adding, “I think we’ve seen, time and time again, that’s not really the case.”
The report highlights how a global network of low-cost online content creators can make political messaging appear grassroots, even when its origins and funding are difficult to establish.
A listing “of this kind, of this scale” happens “once in a generation”, Yatin Singh, chief executive of investment banking at Emkay Global Financial Services in Mumbai, tells Financial Times. Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms is preparing for a proposed $3 billion public offering that could become India’s biggest IPO. Backed by Meta and Google, the telecoms and technology company is targeting a valuation of $107 billion well below the more than $150 billion initially expected.
The FT report presents the offering as both a landmark for India’s capital markets and a test of investor appetite. Reliance Industries faces pressure from global conflict and oil-market disruption, while foreign investors have become more cautious about Indian equities. Reliance shares have fallen 23 percent this year, compared with a 12 percent decline in the Nifty 50.
Jio’s growth story is substantial: it had 533 million users by June, making it one of the world’s largest telecoms operators. But the company faces a maturing mobile market, with analysts saying future growth will increasingly depend on raising average revenue per user rather than adding subscribers at the same pace.
“The mobile segment is saturated and there isn’t much scope to grow subscribers at a very fast pace any more,” Vivekanand Subbaraman, an analyst, tells FT.
Jio signed an agreement with Musk’s SpaceX last year to sell Starlink equipment in India, even as its own satellite business competes with the American billionaire’s ambitions. This month, Musk accused Ambani of using his influence to obstruct Starlink’s entry into India, calling him “Prime Minister Ambani” and “the real boss of India”.
Jio responded: “We welcome competition in satellite communications, including Starlink.”
Ambani’s children are also central to the story. Akash leads Jio, Isha oversees retail and Anant is involved in energy, as the family prepares to divide responsibilities across the group’s sprawling businesses. Jio plans to expand into artificial intelligence, data centres and satellite internet, even as competition intensifies.
It is a test of how investors value Jio’s next phase of growth and the future of the Ambani business empire.
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