The coverage of the recently concluded India AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi tells you more about the status of mainstream media in India than any study or survey. It is also a commentary on how much ordinary Indians accept inconvenience as the norm when international summits are held. 

Glance at the front pages of newspapers during that week. All we saw were photographs of the Prime Minister inaugurating the meeting, with no one around him and yet headlines that spoke of “massive crowds”, the prime minister holding hands with the leading lights in the world of AI (including the awkward non-handholding by two rivals, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic), and more handholding with the world leaders who attended the summit.

It took social media to expose the controversy about Galgotias University, favoured by the government, promoting a robotic dog as their invention when it was actually made in China. This comment by Apoorvanand in Frontline places the controversy in a much-needed perspective. Writing about a “culture of managed untruths”, Apoorvanand writes: “We express outrage at Galgotias, yet for over a decade we have breathed an atmosphere saturated with official untruths. We are told that the Prime Minister’s falsehoods are not moral failings but ‘strategic compulsions.’ He must speak to them to mobilise the masses during elections; he must sustain them afterwards to keep ‘national morale’ aloft. The media and the faithful instruct us to ignore the literal word and instead appreciate the ‘intention’ – a supposedly noble desire to inspire the nation through fabrication.”

Such perspectives did not come through in the coverage of the summit where mainstream media stuck to the expected script, of how successful it was and of glowing statements made by visitors and the VIPs.

Only when the discomfort touched the ruling class was there coverage of some chaos at the summit. This was because seven Youth Congress members entered as visitors but then stripped off their shirts to protest the deals being made by the Prime Minister.

In any other functioning democracy, such a protest would not be considered anti-national.  People protest and the form of protest they choose is aimed at making the people they are protesting against uncomfortable. If they conformed to sitting in a quiet corner allocated by the government to hold a protest, how would they be noticed? The Youth Congress protest came as a surprise because in India, rarely do protests go beyond marches and holding placards.

Yet, the outrage, not just from the ruling party but even for those opposed to it was extraordinary.  The media, especially television, went full throttle criticising their favourite target, the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi for encouraging such a “naked” march (the men were not naked, they had only removed their shirts!). The Prime Minister too played up the “nakedness”. The criticism ranged from “not appropriate” to “imperilling the Republic’s image”. Given these reactions, the seven shirtless men made a bigger impact than they had probably anticipated. 

Only a few commentators, like Member of Parliament Manoj Kumar Jha made the valid point that “the choice of the protest site must be understood not as a lapse in judgement but as a calculated act of political communication; an attempt to amplify dissenting idea by inserting it into a space of maximum visibility.” 

And on the criticism that such a protest is embarrassing before an international audience, he points out: “A nation’s reputation is not built on the absence of dissent but on the robustness of its institutions and the openness of its public sphere. Democracies derive legitimacy precisely from their ability to accommodate protest without resorting to repression.” 

In any case, people from outside India who visited the AI summit were not embarrassed by the protest, given that in many Western democracies such performative protests are common.  Instead, what bothered them was what The Economist refers to as India’s “out of control…VIP culture”.

The magazine commented on how the venue of the AI Summit was cleared for the Prime Minister’s visit and how visitors were inconvenienced and had to contend with walking some distance to the venue just because a VIP chose that moment to visit. “There is no public infrastructure so important it cannot be disrupted for VIPs. Crucial roads across India’s already congested cities are routinely blocked to allow swift passage for public servants,” it stated.

And it concluded: “VIP culture is a marker of status. It operates on an ancient principle of India’s highly stratified society: that servant and master must never drink from the same glass, sit at the same table, pass through the same doorway or in any way appear as equals. For centuries that meant the master was supreme. The genius of India’s public ‘servants’ has been to reverse the hierarchy.”

Is it not ironic that when you have a government in power that is obsessing about getting rid of what it calls the “colonial mindset”, and is busy changing names and replacing statues (the latest being the removal of the bust of the architect of Rashtrapati Bhavan, Edward Lutyens and replacing it with the bust of India’s first Governor General, C Rajagopalachari), that it hasn’t occurred to anyone that this “VIP culture” is the new “colonial mindset” that Indians have accepted? 

Practically no media house raises questions about the need for the Prime Minister and even lesser dignitaries to travel with cavalcades that can go up to 66 fossil-fuel burning vehicles, blocking roads sometimes at peak hour, clearing public exhibitions like the AI Summit of all crowds for one person. How does this fit in with the concept of a democracy where the people elected are supposed to be “people’s representatives”?

Referring to the replacing of Lutyens’ bust in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Indian Express makes this relevant point that: “History’s burdens and inheritances are often intertwined and the path to decolonisation has to begin with an intellectual generosity. A mature republic can hold in the same frame both the courage of a statesman and the aesthetic bequest of a colonial architect, whose vision, however imperial its patronage, is an indelible part of India’s urban landscape.”

Also do read this oped by Sachi Satapathy in Deccan Herald that best sums up the irony of a country claiming it wants to end the “colonial mindset” while blindly accepting another: “The political class has written one set of laws for India and lives by another. The Constitution does not say ‘We, the Politicians.’ It says, ‘We, the People.’ Every road closed for a ministerial motorcade is an act of constitutional inversion – a daily declaration that the elected servant has become the permanent lord.”

India’s “colonial mindset”, however we choose to understand it, will not end as long as mainstream media continues to unquestioningly accept a “VIP culture” that ensures that these “permanent” lords get uncritical coverage.

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