The Narendra Modi government frequently posits India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ or world leader. How the world sees India is often lost in this branding exercise.

Outside India, global voices are monitoring and critiquing human rights violations in India and the rise of Hindutva. We present here monthly highlights of what a range of actors – from UN experts and civil society groups to international media and parliamentarians of many countries – are saying about the state of India’s democracy.

Read the monthly roundup for October 1-31, 2026.

International media reports  

CBC News, Canada, October 8

Susan Ormiston reports on Google building its largest AI data centre, outside the US, in South India, “clearing 600 acres of land” to do so. Environmental and human rights advocates warn that the data centre will consume huge amounts of water in an already dry region, and electricity too. Unlike young tech professionals, the villagers interviewed did not think that the promise of jobs would be realized. A farmer told Ormiston, “Our land is gone and our land is our livelihood”. 

New York Times, US, October 11

Mujib Mashal analyses the dent in Narendra Modi’s “strongman” persona exposed by the clampdown on a wave of youth protests that broke out in October. As “violent scenes” from Delhi became viral, Mashal writes that this is “exposing the rough edges of Modi’s rule and the limits of his formula for maintaining power”. Modi’s strategy of “boxing in opponents” is not working since the youth movement “increasingly draws on a cross-section of society”. “Digital savvy” combined with “Hindu nationalist ideology” is not working with Gen Z. Mashal adds, “the once-battered opposition is feeling invigorated, trying to widen the crack opened by the young people”.    

France 24, France, October 13

AFP highlights innovative protest strategies used by Indian youth in the recent protests. These range from batman masks, flash mobs, a digital dashboard which mapped and matched the movement of detainees with volunteer drivers and sometimes doctors, and protestors who held on to each other to “wriggle out” of police buses. These are some of the ways in which protestors are turning “ingenuity into a form of resistance”.

Al Jazeera, Qatar, October 16

Mahmodul Hassan reports on allegations by the tribal community in Koraput district of Odisha of forged signatures and thumbprints as government acquires the community’s ancestral land for an Adani bauxite mining project. Al Jazeera’s investigation reveals forgery of signatures and thumbprints even of dead and fictitious people. Arpitha Kodiveri, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vassar College, finds this part of a trend of the “illegal administrative practice of implementing the consent provision without adhering to procedure and law” in Odisha and elsewhere.

The Economist, UK, October 18

The Economist reflects on the........

© The Wire