The photographs
The images, released by the U.S. Department of Justice, show Hardeep Singh Puri, now India's Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, seated across a table from Jeffrey Epstein. Puri is in a suit. Epstein appears in a black turtleneck, and papers lie on the table between them.
No third person is visible in any of the frames.
Photos of Union oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein went viral on social media.
Since 20 October, that image has travelled across Indian social media faster than any ministerial communiqué. It has returned India's Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas to a place he believed he had left in February, when he told the press that his encounters with Epstein had been delegation business.
The photograph establishes one thing, and one thing only: that the two men sat together, at a table, on some occasion. It is silent on the date, the agenda, who arranged the meeting and how long it lasted. In politics, an image needs very little to do its work, and this one arrived during a week when New Delhi already had a crowded appointment book with Washington.
What the archive holds
The pictures belong to Data Set 9 of the Epstein files, which the U.S. Department of Justice published on 30 January 2026 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The most widely shared frame carries the catalogue number EFTA01191294.
It has company. The Wire counted at least ten near-identical shots of the same session, filed in sequence from EFTA01191287 to EFTA01191296, each shifting the angle only slightly. The Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, as relayed by Indian Opinion, put the figure at eleven.
The chronology deserves attention. The images sat in a public U.S. government archive for almost nine months before anyone in India noticed them. They surfaced on 20 October through posts by opposition figures, among them Anish Gawande, spokesperson of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), and the Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra.
None of the reporting published so far fixes a date or a place for the meeting. The minister's own office says it cannot do so either.
The word "delegation"
To understand why a seated photograph causes such a stir, one has to return to 11 February. That day, hours after Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, cited Puri's name in the chamber, the minister called a press conference to put the matter to rest.
His account was tidy. He had met Epstein, he said, "three or at max four times" between 2009 and 2017, in a professional capacity linked to the International Peace Institute (IPI) and its Independent Commission on Multilateralism. His superior at the institute, the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, knew the financier. Puri also delivered the line now quoted back at him: "I had no independent meetings with Epstein."
The biography behind that account is a distinguished one. Puri served as India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York from 2009 to 2013 and twice presided over the Security Council. After leaving the foreign service, he became vice president of the IPI and, from September 2014 to March 2016, secretary general of the multilateralism commission chaired by the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.
Puri at the UN Security Council during his years as India's Permanent Representative in New York, 2009 to 2013.
In February, that pedigree served as a shield. Seven months later, critics read the photograph as the place where the shield gives way.
The office answers
Puri has answered this time through his office, in writing, to The Wire. The defence turns on a narrower reading of February.
Hardeep Singh Puri. His office says he cannot recall which meeting the photographs record.
The first meeting with Epstein, it said, took place as part of an IPI delegation led by Rød-Larsen, and that was the context the minister had been describing. othersIn the office's words, he "did not say he never met Epstein alone." Nearly a decade later, it added, Puri cannot recall which meeting the pictures record, or whether were present before or after the shutter clicked.
The office then turned the images to its own advantage. To its eye they show "working meetings, held across a table with notes and papers", in a professional setting and in business attire. It repeated that Puri never set foot on Epstein's island, that the conversations concerned investor interest in India's economy and digital potential, and that a great many people in academia, science, business and politics met Epstein in those years.
The argument holds together on its own terms, and the suit, the papers and the table do lend it some support. Its weak point lies elsewhere. "No independent meetings" was a categorical phrase, and the office now presents the delegation as the setting of the first encounter alone. Between those two versions lies the whole political space of the affair.
The paper trail
The photographs land on top of a correspondence that has been public since January. According to The Wire's reading of the emails, the exchanges between the two men run from June 2014 to June 2017, a period when Puri held no public office.
The scheduling messages, handled by Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff, set three meetings at the financier's Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street: 4 February 2015, 6 January 2016 and 19 May 2017. A fourth, planned for 9 January 2015, was cancelled because Epstein had left New York. Add the first delegation encounter, which Drop Site News, as cited by American Kahani, places in June 2014 alongside Rød-Larsen, and Puri's arithmetic of "three or four" roughly survives. The contested point is the format of those meetings.
The Herbert N. Straus House at 9 East 71st Street, Epstein's former Manhattan townhouse, where the scheduling emails place three of the meetings. Photo: Jim.henderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The content of the letters is mostly about business. On 24 September 2014, Epstein introduced Puri to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in a two-line email, and Puri later pitched Hoffman on India's internet economy and the Digital India programme. Other messages wander further: in October 2014, Puri forwarded Epstein's request for an Indian visa for his assistant to a former diplomat, asking that it be handled on priority. In December of that year, he asked to drop by once Epstein returned from his island, offering books to kindle an interest in India.
Two details complicate any simple portrait. Puri has said he knew nothing of Epstein's criminal record during those years, although the 2008 Florida guilty plea was a matter of public record. And in one exchange with Rød-Larsen over a forwarded Puri email, Epstein dismissed the Indian diplomat as two-faced, a remark Puri cited in February as proof that the two were never close. The last documented message dates from June 2017, a few months before Puri joined Narendra Modi's government.
The institute across the street
The International Peace Institute is the minister's alibi, and it is also the road that led to Epstein's door. The think tank sits facing the United Nations headquarters in New York and, for years, served as a meeting ground for ambassadors, former heads of government and donors..
Its longtime president was Terje Rød-Larsen, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords. In October 2020, after the Norwegian business daily DN revealed that he had taken a personal loan of $130,000 from Epstein in 2013 and secured donations from Epstein's foundations, he resigned and apologised for his judgment. The institute had received $650,000 from Epstein-linked foundations between 2011 and 2019, and it pledged an equivalent sum to programmes supporting victims of trafficking and sexual violence.
Kevin Rudd, who chaired both the institute's board and the commission Puri ran, said he had learned of the donations only through the Norwegian press in November 2019. The United Nations withdrew from its honorary role at the institute the day after Rød-Larsen left.
This is the world Puri describes: a respectable institution, a well-connected boss, a financier who opened doors in Silicon Valley. Each element is accurate. Together they also describe how Epstein turned philanthropy and introductions into access.
Mumbai, the same week
The photographs began to circulate on the very day U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Mumbai, on 20 October, for a three-day visit, his second to India this year. He met External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, travelled on to the refining hub of Jamnagar, and said the long-awaited trade agreement was "very, very close".
Rahul Gandhi seized on the coincidence. On 21 October he wrote on X that Rubio had gone to Mumbai, that the Justice Department had released a picture of Epstein and Puri, and asked BJP and RSS workers "which anti-national traitor do you think they're blackmailing?" The Congress leader Srinivas B.V. went further, wondering aloud whether a video might follow to settle the finer points of the trade deal.
The theory rests on a premise the record contradicts. The Justice Department released the images on 30 January, nearly nine months before Rubio arrived. What coincided with his visit was their discovery and spread on Indian social media.
The rest of the opposition chose sharper words than the pictures support. Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena (UBT) asked "Whose message is he carrying in the meeting?" and told reporters the images showed Puri partying with Epstein, pointing to glasses on the table; the frames show a seated conversation over papers. Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal accused Modi of ignoring Puri's close ties to Epstein and claimed the photographs proved the meetings took place in the rooms where Epstein committed his crimes, a claim no published evidence supports, since the location of the images remains unestablished. Mahua Moitra opted for irony, suggesting the other delegates must have been hiding under the table.
The government side has kept its distance from the substance. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra answered Gandhi by accusing him of plotting regime change from abroad, and Venugopal charged Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah with "criminal indifference" for their silence. Even the former Union minister Subramanian Swamy publicly asked the prime minister to explain Puri's dealings with Epstein.
The forgery that borrowed the frame
Within days, the authentic image had produced a counterfeit. A version circulated online showing Sonia Gandhi in Puri's armchair, facing Epstein across the same table.
Fact-checkers took it apart quickly. The Quint traced the framing to the Justice Department photographs of Puri and found a SynthID watermark indicating the image had been generated or edited with OpenAI tools. Newschecker matched Epstein's position, the background and the objects on the table to the original, and its detection tools, along with OpenAI's own verifier, flagged the result as AI-generated. Fact-checkers also reported finding no photographs of Epstein with Modi, Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi in the released files.
The episode carries its own irony. The one genuine picture in this affair, the one that embarrasses a ruling-party minister, became the template for a fake aimed at the opposition. In the Epstein archive, as elsewhere, a real document now travels with its doctored double close behind.
A caption still unwritten
The essential questions remain where they were on 20 October. On what date were the pictures taken, and in which room? Who arranged the meeting, who held the camera, and did anyone else sit at that table before or after the frames were captured? The minister's office says memory fails on every point. The Justice Department, for its part, publishes its files without commentary.
The affair also lands at a delicate moment for Puri's career. On 5 October, the BJP left him off its list of Rajya Sabha candidates from Uttar Pradesh, and his current term ends on 25 November. Party sources spoke of social, regional and caste balance, and the BJP has drawn no link to Epstein. Under Article 75(5) of the Constitution, a minister may serve up to six consecutive months without a seat in Parliament, which leaves his future in the hands of the prime minister and the long-rumoured cabinet reshuffle.
Ten frames, one table, two men, and a caption nobody has yet supplied. Until the minister recovers his memory or the archive yields a date, the photograph will keep speaking in the voices of those who hold it up.
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. He was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges and died in custody the following month while awaiting trial. Nothing in the released material links Hardeep Singh Puri to Epstein's crimes, and he denies any wrongdoing.
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The photographs
The images, released by the U.S. Department of Justice, show Hardeep Singh Puri, now India's Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, seated across a table from Jeffrey Epstein. Puri is in a suit. Epstein appears in a black turtleneck, and papers lie on the table between them.
No third person is visible in any of the frames.
Photos of Union oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein went viral on social media.
Since 20 October, that image has travelled across Indian social media faster than any ministerial communiqué. It has returned India's Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas to a place he believed he had left in February, when he told the press that his encounters with Epstein had been delegation business.
The photograph establishes one thing, and one thing only: that the two men sat together, at a table, on some occasion. It is silent on the date, the agenda, who arranged the meeting and how long it lasted. In politics, an image needs very little to do its work, and this one arrived during a week when New Delhi already had a crowded appointment book with Washington.
What the archive holds
The pictures belong to Data Set 9 of the Epstein files, which the U.S. Department of Justice published on 30 January 2026 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The most widely shared frame carries the catalogue number EFTA01191294.
It has company. The Wire counted at least ten near-identical shots of the same session, filed in sequence from EFTA01191287 to EFTA01191296, each shifting the angle only slightly. The Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, as relayed by Indian Opinion, put the figure at eleven.
The chronology deserves attention. The images sat in a public U.S. government archive for almost nine months before anyone in India noticed them. They surfaced on 20 October through posts by opposition figures, among them Anish Gawande, spokesperson of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), and the Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra.
None of the reporting published so far fixes a date or a place for the meeting. The minister's own office says it cannot do so either.
The word "delegation"
To understand why a seated photograph causes such a stir, one has to return to 11 February. That day, hours after Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, cited Puri's name in the chamber, the minister called a press conference to put the matter to rest.
His account was tidy. He had met Epstein, he said, "three or at max four times" between 2009 and 2017, in a professional capacity linked to the International Peace Institute (IPI) and its Independent Commission on Multilateralism. His superior at the institute, the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, knew the financier. Puri also delivered the line now quoted back at him: "I had no independent meetings with Epstein."
The biography behind that account is a distinguished one. Puri served as India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York from 2009 to 2013 and twice presided over the Security Council. After leaving the foreign service, he became vice president of the IPI and, from September 2014 to March 2016, secretary general of the multilateralism commission chaired by the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.
Puri at the UN Security Council during his years as India's Permanent Representative in New York, 2009 to 2013.
In February, that pedigree served as a shield. Seven months later, critics read the photograph as the place where the shield gives way.
The office answers
Puri has answered this time through his office, in writing, to The Wire. The defence turns on a narrower reading of February.
Hardeep Singh Puri. His office says he cannot recall which meeting the photographs record.
The first meeting with Epstein, it said, took place as part of an IPI delegation led by Rød-Larsen, and that was the context the minister had been describing. othersIn the office's words, he "did not say he never met Epstein alone." Nearly a decade later, it added, Puri cannot recall which meeting the pictures record, or whether were present before or after the shutter clicked.
The office then turned the images to its own advantage. To its eye they show "working meetings, held across a table with notes and papers", in a professional setting and in business attire. It repeated that Puri never set foot on Epstein's island, that the conversations concerned investor interest in India's economy and digital potential, and that a great many people in academia, science, business and politics met Epstein in those years.
The argument holds together on its own terms, and the suit, the papers and the table do lend it some support. Its weak point lies elsewhere. "No independent meetings" was a categorical phrase, and the office now presents the delegation as the setting of the first encounter alone. Between those two versions lies the whole political space of the affair.
The paper trail
The photographs land on top of a correspondence that has been public since January. According to The Wire's reading of the emails, the exchanges between the two men run from June 2014 to June 2017, a period when Puri held no public office.
The scheduling messages, handled by Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff, set three meetings at the financier's Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street: 4 February 2015, 6 January 2016 and 19 May 2017. A fourth, planned for 9 January 2015, was cancelled because Epstein had left New York. Add the first delegation encounter, which Drop Site News, as cited by American Kahani, places in June 2014 alongside Rød-Larsen, and Puri's arithmetic of "three or four" roughly survives. The contested point is the format of those meetings.
The Herbert N. Straus House at 9 East 71st Street, Epstein's former Manhattan townhouse, where the scheduling emails place three of the meetings. Photo: Jim.henderson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The content of the letters is mostly about business. On 24 September 2014, Epstein introduced Puri to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in a two-line email, and Puri later pitched Hoffman on India's internet economy and the Digital India programme. Other messages wander further: in October 2014, Puri forwarded Epstein's request for an Indian visa for his assistant to a former diplomat, asking that it be handled on priority. In December of that year, he asked to drop by once Epstein returned from his island, offering books to kindle an interest in India.
Two details complicate any simple portrait. Puri has said he knew nothing of Epstein's criminal record during those years, although the 2008 Florida guilty plea was a matter of public record. And in one exchange with Rød-Larsen over a forwarded Puri email, Epstein dismissed the Indian diplomat as two-faced, a remark Puri cited in February as proof that the two were never close. The last documented message dates from June 2017, a few months before Puri joined Narendra Modi's government.
The institute across the street
The International Peace Institute is the minister's alibi, and it is also the road that led to Epstein's door. The think tank sits facing the United Nations headquarters in New York and, for years, served as a meeting ground for ambassadors, former heads of government and donors..
Its longtime president was Terje Rød-Larsen, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords. In October 2020, after the Norwegian business daily DN revealed that he had taken a personal loan of $130,000 from Epstein in 2013 and secured donations from Epstein's foundations, he resigned and apologised for his judgment. The institute had received $650,000 from Epstein-linked foundations between 2011 and 2019, and it pledged an equivalent sum to programmes supporting victims of trafficking and sexual violence.
Kevin Rudd, who chaired both the institute's board and the commission Puri ran, said he had learned of the donations only through the Norwegian press in November 2019. The United Nations withdrew from its honorary role at the institute the day after Rød-Larsen left.
This is the world Puri describes: a respectable institution, a well-connected boss, a financier who opened doors in Silicon Valley. Each element is accurate. Together they also describe how Epstein turned philanthropy and introductions into access.
Mumbai, the same week
The photographs began to circulate on the very day U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Mumbai, on 20 October, for a three-day visit, his second to India this year. He met External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, travelled on to the refining hub of Jamnagar, and said the long-awaited trade agreement was "very, very close".
Rahul Gandhi seized on the coincidence. On 21 October he wrote on X that Rubio had gone to Mumbai, that the Justice Department had released a picture of Epstein and Puri, and asked BJP and RSS workers "which anti-national traitor do you think they're blackmailing?" The Congress leader Srinivas B.V. went further, wondering aloud whether a video might follow to settle the finer points of the trade deal.
The theory rests on a premise the record contradicts. The Justice Department released the images on 30 January, nearly nine months before Rubio arrived. What coincided with his visit was their discovery and spread on Indian social media.
The rest of the opposition chose sharper words than the pictures support. Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena (UBT) asked "Whose message is he carrying in the meeting?" and told reporters the images showed Puri partying with Epstein, pointing to glasses on the table; the frames show a seated conversation over papers. Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal accused Modi of ignoring Puri's close ties to Epstein and claimed the photographs proved the meetings took place in the rooms where Epstein committed his crimes, a claim no published evidence supports, since the location of the images remains unestablished. Mahua Moitra opted for irony, suggesting the other delegates must have been hiding under the table.
The government side has kept its distance from the substance. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra answered Gandhi by accusing him of plotting regime change from abroad, and Venugopal charged Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah with "criminal indifference" for their silence. Even the former Union minister Subramanian Swamy publicly asked the prime minister to explain Puri's dealings with Epstein.
The forgery that borrowed the frame
Within days, the authentic image had produced a counterfeit. A version circulated online showing Sonia Gandhi in Puri's armchair, facing Epstein across the same table.
Fact-checkers took it apart quickly. The Quint traced the framing to the Justice Department photographs of Puri and found a SynthID watermark indicating the image had been generated or edited with OpenAI tools. Newschecker matched Epstein's position, the background and the objects on the table to the original, and its detection tools, along with OpenAI's own verifier, flagged the result as AI-generated. Fact-checkers also reported finding no photographs of Epstein with Modi, Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi in the released files.
The episode carries its own irony. The one genuine picture in this affair, the one that embarrasses a ruling-party minister, became the template for a fake aimed at the opposition. In the Epstein archive, as elsewhere, a real document now travels with its doctored double close behind.
A caption still unwritten
The essential questions remain where they were on 20 October. On what date were the pictures taken, and in which room? Who arranged the meeting, who held the camera, and did anyone else sit at that table before or after the frames were captured? The minister's office says memory fails on every point. The Justice Department, for its part, publishes its files without commentary.
The affair also lands at a delicate moment for Puri's career. On 5 October, the BJP left him off its list of Rajya Sabha candidates from Uttar Pradesh, and his current term ends on 25 November. Party sources spoke of social, regional and caste balance, and the BJP has drawn no link to Epstein. Under Article 75(5) of the Constitution, a minister may serve up to six consecutive months without a seat in Parliament, which leaves his future in the hands of the prime minister and the long-rumoured cabinet reshuffle.
Ten frames, one table, two men, and a caption nobody has yet supplied. Until the minister recovers his memory or the archive yields a date, the photograph will keep speaking in the voices of those who hold it up.
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. He was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges and died in custody the following month while awaiting trial. Nothing in the released material links Hardeep Singh Puri to Epstein's crimes, and he denies any wrongdoing.
TO BE CONTINUED, FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
This is where the surface ends and the reporting begins.
The complete piece, the full archive, and access to The French Press Circle. Reporting answerable only to its readers.
Already a subscriber ?
Login
Read these on the house, with our compliments.
A selection from the current issue, open to all readers. Read them in full. The rest is one decision away.