Indian political consultancies have built a global shadow-campaign industry, exporting the same disinformation infrastructure that dominates domestic Indian elections to presidential races in Kenya, primaries in the United States, and campaigns across South America, Africa, and South Asia. Researchers have now documented at least 28 accounts on X posting from India to support US Democratic candidate Haley Stevens's Michigan Senate primary, generating over seven million views. The accounts were identified by Antibot4Navalny and corroborated by Clemson University's Media Forensic Hub. The operational model is strikingly low-cost and high-volume. A 22-year-old content creator in Ahmedabad, Rajan Kumar, produced up to 100 social media creatives per day for William Ruto's 2022 Kenyan presidential campaign at $7 a day. Content included trimmed speeches designed to distort opponents' statements, fabricated popularity claims, and gendered smear campaigns against female politicians — all routed through shadow social media accounts that conceal coordination behind apparent independence. Kumar never interacted directly with campaign principals; the supply chain is deliberately compartmentalized. The infrastructure relies on systematic exploitation of platform loopholes. VPNs spoof geographic origin, account country settings are changed to bypass regional advertising restrictions, and shadow pages on Meta and Google are bought, rebranded, or rented for specific campaigns. Al Jazeera's prior investigation ahead of India's 2024 elections revealed a sprawling marketplace of such pages for sale. Platform rules requiring identity verification and advertising disclosure exist on paper but are, by the consultants' own account, routinely circumvented. Payment flows are equally opaque. Multiple consultants describe reliance on hawala networks — informal, trust-based cross-border money transfer systems that bypass banking oversight entirely. At least three consultants identified export businesses in Delhi's Chandni Chowk market as hawala hubs for political consultation payments. One consultant described collecting a cash payment using a banknote serial number as an authentication code. The term 'black money' was used by a consultant to describe the financial backbone of the industry. The human costs are not abstract. Two Indian consultants working on Ruto's Kenya campaign, Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan and Mohamed Zaid Sami Kidwai, disappeared in Nairobi in July 2022 and were found dead in October, allegedly abducted by an elite police unit. Ruto disbanded that unit after winning. Fifteen officers were charged with murder, but Kenya's High Court terminated those charges in August 2026 after prosecutors requested discontinuation of the investigation. Consultant Tushar Giri frames India's position bluntly: 'It is like you buy toys from China; similarly, you can manipulate elections anywhere in the world at the cheapest cost in India.' Author Amogh Dhar Sharma calls it an extension of India's business-process outsourcing model — the same labor arbitrage that built IT services, now applied to political manipulation. The physical distance between operators and target countries provides what Sharma calls 'plausible deniability' for all parties. Nearly a dozen consultants spoke openly to Al Jazeera about the absence of guardrails, legal consequences, or ethical limits. The industry operates in a regulatory vacuum: no Indian law governs cross-border election interference services, platform enforcement is performative, and the receiving countries lack jurisdiction over operators in India. The consultants are explicit about what they do. As Giri put it: 'We are manipulating elections; there is no other way to say it.'
