When Association Becomes a Moral Question
Across continents, the release of fresh documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has triggered resignations, investigations and public reckonings. From Europe to North America, prominent figures have stepped aside or been compelled to explain why they continued to engage with a man who, as early as 2008, had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor and was a registered sex offender.
In India, however, the response has been strikingly muted.
The issue is not one of guilt by association. Nor is it a rush to pronounce criminal culpability where none has been established. The issue is moral judgment — the standard of ethical discernment expected from those who hold or aspire to hold public office. It is about whether proximity to power eclipses the most elementary considerations of decency.
And it is here that the case of Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri raises troubling questions.
Meetings After Conviction: A Question of Judgment
The documents indicate that Hardeep Singh Puri, then a retired diplomat and former Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, engaged in multiple meetings and email exchanges with Epstein beginning in 2014 — six years after Epstein’s conviction and registration as a sex offender.
The meetings reportedly included visits to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. Email exchanges numbered in the dozens. One message referenced Epstein’s return from an “exotic island” — widely understood to refer to Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands, a property later central to multiple abuse allegations.
The minister has maintained that his interactions were strictly professional and related to economic outreach and networking. That may well be his position.
But the question remains: What does it say about public judgment when a former senior diplomat — and later a cabinet minister — chooses to cultivate ties with a man whose criminal history was widely reported internationally?
Public life is not governed merely by the criminal code. It is guided by ethical prudence.
The Minimisation of Crime
Equally troubling has been the tone of public defence. In attempting to contextualise Epstein’s 2008 conviction, the offence was described in language that appeared to reduce it to “soliciting the favours of an underage woman.”
That phrasing is not a minor semantic lapse. It reflects an attitude.
Epstein’s conviction involved the sexual abuse of a minor. The distinction between “solicitation” and “abuse” is not rhetorical; it goes to the heart of how society names harm. When public officials blur that distinction, even inadvertently, they risk signalling that crimes against children can be reframed, softened, or normalised.
Ethics in public life begins with clarity — clarity about wrongdoing, clarity about power, clarity about harm.
Elite Networks and the Culture of Usefulness
Other Indian names have surfaced in the wider disclosures, including industrialist Anil Ambani. Emails suggest he sought introductions and strategic connections through Epstein in areas ranging from defence business to access in Washington. There is no evidence in the documents of criminal conduct by Ambani. But the exchanges underscore a larger point: Epstein retained social and strategic “usefulness” long after his conviction.
That usefulness appears to have extended across political and corporate worlds internationally. It speaks to a culture where access often trumps ethics, and where reputational risk is calculated in terms of opportunity rather than morality.
In India, the same pattern is uncomfortable but familiar: informal channels, elite insulation, plausible deniability.
When power networks operate through private emails and social introductions rather than transparent institutional processes, the line between diplomacy and impropriety grows thin.
The Silence of Accountability
Why does this matter?
Because democratic ethics depend not merely on legality but on example. Ministers are not private citizens. They embody the state.
The Indian Constitution may not contain a chapter titled “Moral Judgment,” but public trust depends on it. The spirit of constitutional governance demands that those entrusted with national responsibility avoid even the appearance of impropriety — particularly when it involves a man already convicted of exploiting minors.
The larger silence is equally revealing. Sections of the media have treated these revelations cautiously, if not indifferently. Public debate has focused less on ethical scrutiny and more on partisan defensiveness. Yet accountability cannot be selective. It cannot demand resignation in one hemisphere and indifference in another.
Survivors at the Edge of the Frame
Lost in the spectacle of names and networks are the survivors.
For nearly three decades, victims spoke out. Early reports in the 1990s went unheeded. In 2008, Epstein secured a plea deal widely criticised as lenient. When he was arrested again in 2019, survivors such as Virginia Giuffre and others came forward publicly, recounting abuse that began when they were children. Epstein died in custody before trial, leaving many without closure.
Every time elite reputations dominate the narrative, survivors recede from view.
Ethical public life demands centring the harmed, not the powerful.
India’s Moment of Reflection
This is not about importing an American scandal into Indian politics. It is about examining our own standards.
Should a public servant, fully aware of a financier’s criminal conviction involving minors, choose to meet him repeatedly? Should the subsequent explanation rest on technicalities of “professional interaction”? Should minimising language suffice as defence?
These are not legal questions. They are moral ones.
India prides itself on civilisational values, on dharma, on public virtue. Yet virtue in public life is not asserted in speeches; it is demonstrated in choices. The test of ethics is not how one behaves in the presence of cameras, but how one chooses associates when no one is watching.
The true scandal is not that Indian names appear in a set of documents. The scandal is that a convicted abuser could remain socially and politically valuable to so many — across nations, across parties, across industries.
Power, when untethered from moral restraint, always seeks convenience. Ethics demands inconvenience.
In a democracy as large and aspirational as India, the expectation from ministers cannot be minimal compliance. It must be moral clarity.
The question is simple, and it lingers: In public life, is association merely transactional — or is it also ethical?
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
