Indian election consultants expand reach to US midterms, experts say

The rise of indian election consultants has taken a new turn as researchers uncover their involvement in the United States midterm elections. In the weeks leading up to the November 2026 contests, a network of shadow social‑media accounts based in India was found pushing content for specific candidates, mirroring tactics previously used in Kenya, South America and Africa. The investigation, conducted by Al Jazeera and corroborated by independent research groups, shows how low‑cost digital creators are enlisted to produce hundreds of posts that appear to come from independent users while actually serving foreign campaign interests.

In a cramped flat in Ahmedabad, 22‑year‑old content creator Rajan Kumar described his nightly routine of designing posters and editing videos for a campaign thousands of kilometres away. He spent $7 a day producing up to 100 social‑media assets for Kenya’s 2022 presidential race, where his work was posted on covert pages that masked the true source. “If there’s a woman politician, we simply link her to someone to damage her reputation,” Kumar told Al Jazeera, adding that all controversial material is diverted to shadow pages for “extensive distribution”. His experience is now being replicated in the United States, where similar accounts have posted videos supporting Democratic candidate Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Senate primary.

The Michigan operation, first reported by the New York Times, generated more than seven million views on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Antibot4Navalny, a group that monitors coordinated disinformation campaigns, identified at least 28 accounts sharing the pro‑Stevens videos, with at least 15 of those accounts operating from India. Researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensic Hub independently confirmed the same pattern, noting that the Indian‑based pages were programmed to boost the candidate’s visibility while hiding the true sponsors.

Political consultants in India, many of whom spoke to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, describe a business model that treats election manipulation as a commodity. “We are manipulating elections; there is no other way to say it,” said Tushar Giri, a consultant based in New Delhi. He added that the concept of electoral democracy is “overrated” and that “everything is manipulated”. The consultants argue that their expertise in creating viral content, re‑branding existing pages and exploiting loopholes in platform policies makes them attractive to foreign campaigns seeking cheap, plausible‑deniability solutions.

The tactics echo earlier findings that Russian actors used similar methods to sway voters in the United States. However, the Indian model leans heavily on a sprawling supply chain of low‑paid digital workers, VPNs to mask locations, and informal money‑transfer systems known as hawala. Kumar explained that he was paid about $7 a day under a monthly contract and coordinated his output via Telegram groups. He never met any senior campaign officials, and the identities of those higher up the chain remain concealed. “One always needs to be careful and hide footprints nonetheless,” he said, noting that chats are regularly deleted and SIM cards destroyed.

Financial flows behind the scenes are equally opaque. An anonymous consultant described using Indian banknotes with specific serial numbers as codes to collect millions in cash, a practice that mirrors the informal networks used for “black money” transfers. The same consultant recalled a dramatic deal in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market, where a 10‑rupee note served as a token to trigger a larger payment. Such mechanisms allow foreign campaigns to funnel money through shell companies abroad, bypassing traditional banking oversight and making it difficult for regulators to trace the source.

The reach of indian election consultants extends beyond the United States. Sharma, author of *Backstage of Democracy*, noted that the same firms have operated in Australia, Germany, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Suriname, often pitching their services as a “wholesale market” for political manipulation. “It is like you buy toys from China; similarly, you can manipulate elections anywhere in the world at the cheapest cost in India,” Giri explained. The consultants liken their work to the business‑process outsourcing boom that propelled India’s economic growth in the early 2000s, suggesting that political outsourcing is the next frontier.

Platform policies designed to prevent covert political advertising are routinely skirted. Meta’s rules forbid the sale or exchange of accounts and require political advertisers to verify their identities, yet consultants exploit loopholes and use VPNs to change an account’s country of origin. Giri admitted that “these platforms have long pages of such rules, but when you read between the lines, there are several loopholes one can exploit.” By creating new pages from scratch or hijacking existing ones, they can disseminate content that would be banned on official campaign channels.

The human cost of these shadow operations has been stark. Two Indian consultants, Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan and Mohamed Zaid Sami Kidwai, disappeared in Nairobi in July 2022 while working for the Kenyan campaign. Their bodies were later found, allegedly abducted by an elite police unit that was later disbanded after the election. Although the Kenyan High Court terminated the murder charges in August 2026, the episode show the danger faced by operatives who move across borders in politically volatile environments.

As the United States moves toward the midterm polls, election officials are scrambling to identify and neutralize foreign interference. The Federal Election Commission has warned campaigns about illicit online activity, and social‑media platforms have pledged to tighten enforcement of political advertising rules. Nonetheless, the investigation suggests that the supply chain for such interference is already embedded in a global network of cheap digital labor and covert financing.

The next step, according to the researchers, is closer monitoring of account creation patterns and coordinated in‑authorship signals that could reveal the presence of indian election consultants behind seemingly organic content. Al Jazeera plans to continue tracking the flow of money and the deployment of shadow pages as the midterm elections approach, aiming to provide authorities with actionable intelligence before the voting day arrives.