On a February afternoon in New Delhi, the press room at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters felt unusually airless. Reporters leaned forward in their chairs, notebooks half‑raised, as Hardeep Singh Puri—former diplomat, current Union Minister, and one of the government’s most polished communicators—adjusted his spectacles and prepared to speak. The allegations tying him to the newly unsealed Jeffrey Epstein files had arrived like a sudden monsoon squall, darkening the horizon of an otherwise predictable news cycle. Puri, unflappable as ever, dismissed the charges as “buffoonery,” the sort of political theater he claimed to have outgrown. His interactions with Epstein, he insisted, were limited, professional, and firmly rooted in his work with the International Peace Institute.
It was a performance of control, delivered with the practiced ease of a man who has spent decades navigating diplomatic corridors. Yet the documents—millions of emails, messages, and records released by the U.S. Justice Department—tell a more complicated story. They trace a relationship that stretched across three years, from 2014 to 2017, and one that drifted beyond the boundaries of multilateral diplomacy. Epstein, ever the broker of improbable introductions, connected Puri to Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, nudging conversations toward India’s digital economy at a moment when “Make in India” and “Digital India” were still slogans in search of global patrons.
The meetings, too, resist Puri’s neat framing. Records place him at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse on at least three occasions—spaces whose ornate interiors have since become synonymous with the financier’s predatory world. There is no evidence linking Puri to those crimes, but the setting complicates his claim that these were merely delegation‑level encounters. Emails hint at smaller, more personal gatherings. Epstein sent autographed books to Puri’s daughters. And in one message, Puri, with a diplomat’s light touch, refers to Epstein’s “exotic island,” a phrase that now reads with the uneasy glow of hindsight.
Why, then, the insistence on a sanitized narrative? Why the narrowing of context when the documents widen it? The question lingers, not because Puri’s conduct mirrors the worst of Epstein’s circle—it does not—but because the episode reveals something about the architecture of power in Narendra Modi’s India. It is a system that prizes loyalty, rewards strategic utility, and often treats transparency as an optional accessory.
Puri’s ascent within the BJP is striking for its velocity. A 1974‑batch Indian Foreign Service officer, he joined the party in 2014 and, within three years, was elevated to a ministerial post. By 2021, he held the Petroleum and Natural Gas portfolio, a position that places him at the center of India’s most consequential international negotiations. His diplomatic résumé is formidable, but the speed of his rise suggests a deeper calculus—one in which access, networks, and geopolitical fluency carry as much weight as ideological alignment.
Consider the timing. In the mid‑2010s, as Modi sought to recast India’s relationship with the United States, Epstein’s network—however tainted—offered a backchannel to American elites. The emails between Puri and Epstein revolve around precisely the kinds of introductions that could accelerate such ambitions. When Epstein’s scandals grew too radioactive, India’s foreign‑policy gaze shifted. Israel emerged as a new fulcrum: a partner in defense, technology, and counterterrorism, and a bridge to Washington’s strategic establishment. Modi’s 2017 visit to Israel, the first by an Indian prime minister, formalized this pivot. Puri, with his UN background and his earlier U.S.‑adjacent networking, fit neatly into this evolving architecture.
To read this trajectory as mere coincidence is to overlook the broader pattern. Modi’s governance style has been defined by centralization—of authority, of narrative, of institutional power. Critics describe an ecosystem in which dissent is met with legal intimidation, where data is withheld or massaged, and where the line between party and state blurs with each passing year. The government’s handling of crises—from the opacity surrounding COVID‑19 fatalities to the silence over ethnic violence in Manipur—has reinforced the sense of a regime more invested in image than accountability.
Even the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has occasionally bristled at Modi’s solitary command. Yet the machinery continues to tighten. India’s civic space has been downgraded by international watchdogs. Journalists face lawsuits, raids, and the quiet pressure of ownership changes. Opposition leaders are cast as obstacles to national progress, or worse, as threats to national security.
Against this backdrop, the Puri‑Epstein episode becomes less an isolated controversy than a case study in how opaque networks intersect with political reward. It reveals the ease with which personal relationships can be reframed as official duty, and how the absence of transparency allows such reframings to persist unchallenged.
India, a democracy of immense ambition and even greater complexity, deserves better than narratives that shift with political convenience. It deserves leaders who acknowledge the full contours of their past, not only the portions that withstand scrutiny. And it deserves a public sphere in which questions—however uncomfortable—are met with candor rather than choreography.
If Epstein’s shadow stretches into Indian politics, it is not because of the scandal itself, but because it illuminates a deeper truth: power, when shielded from accountability, tends to seek the dimmest corners. The task ahead is not merely to expose those corners, but to insist that they no longer exist.
(Satish Jha was the Editor of newsweekly Dinamaan of The Times of India Group)
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