India’s Mainstream Media Didn’t Miss the Epstein Story. It Chose to Ignore It.

On January 30, 2026, the United States Department of Justice released over 3 million pages of Epstein documents. Within 48 hours, newsrooms across the UK, US, Australia, and even Pakistan had filed detailed reports. Indian prime time television, the loudest, most watched news ecosystem in the world by viewership numbers, spent that same week debating a mosque in Sambhal and a cricketer’s fitness.

This was not an oversight. This was a choice.
The Epstein files contain direct references to India’s Prime Minister, his 2017 Israel visit, a senior Union Minister by name, and one of India’s most politically connected industrialists – Anil Ambani, who appears in sustained email correspondence with Epstein across 2017 and 2018. Ambani, per the files, was seeking to connect Indian leadership with Jared Kushner and other figures in the Trump White House, all while holding the offset contract for India’s ₹59,000 crore Rafale deal through a company incorporated just weeks before that deal was announced.

If a Pakistani businessman appeared in the Epstein files coordinating meetings between Imran Khan and the Trump administration, you can be absolutely certain which Indian channel would have run a 9 PM special on it.
As veteran journalist P. Sainath has long argued: “The Indian media’s biggest failure is not that it gets things wrong. It is that it decides, very deliberately, what never gets asked.”
That silence has a cost. It is paid by the Indian taxpayer who funded those 36 jets and deserves to know who negotiated the terms, and through whose network.
A detailed investigation into the Epstein-Rafale connection, the India-Israel defense pivot, and the backchannel that ran parallel to official diplomacy has been published at
indiadecode.in because some stories only find a home where editorial independence is
non-negotiable. The question is not whether Indian media can cover this story. The question is whether it still has the spine to.