INDIA PERSPECTIVE

India is framing global AI regulation from its claimed position as leader of the Global South and the world's largest democracy—a dual status that Indian media systematically mobilises to distinguish itself from China's authoritarian model and American technological hegemony. The Times of India and Republic TV gave extensive coverage to the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, where Prime Minister Modi unveiled the M.A.N.A.V. vision (Modi's Narendra AI Vision for Human-centric Odyssey)—an acronym that means "human being" in Hindi. This "human-centric" positioning contrasts with Trump's pro-business approach and Chinese state control, yet remains largely rhetorical: the India AI Governance Guidelines published by MeitY in November 2025 carry no legal binding force.

India's legislative framework is actually a patchwork still under construction. The IT Rules 2026, which came into force on 20 February, specifically target deepfakes and synthetic media—a priority driven by India's electoral context and risks of mass influence in a country of 1.4 billion people. The AI Ethics and Accountability Bill, a private members' bill introduced in December 2025, proposes a statutory ethics committee, mandatory bias audits, and penalties up to 5 crores of rupees. However, The Indian Express and NDTV note this legislation has little chance of passage in the near term, with the Modi government favouring a "light-touch" approach—a term directly borrowed from Washington's vocabulary.

What Indian media largely obscures is India's massive dependence on American technology. The claimed strategic non-alignment—purchasing Russian oil, cooperating with China through BRICS, allying with the United States on the Quad—does not operate the same way in AI, where foundation models, cloud computing, and chips are almost exclusively American or Chinese. The rhetoric of "Bharat" as a 5,000-year-old civilisational power meets the reality of a country with no sovereign reference LLM. The question of caste and algorithmic bias—arguably a major issue in such a stratified society—is conspicuously absent from mainstream coverage.