 Summary of this article
- At its most disturbing, the Galgotias controversy settled on a woman’s body and her competence
- The university issued statements, ultimately apologising and stating their representative, a woman professor, was “ill-informed” and “not authorised to speak.”
- In the context of the Summit, where AI raises profound questions about bias, power and structural inequality, we failed to interrogate these dynamics
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 could have been an opportunity. When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a scientific fiction, but has sped into our everyday lives, the Summit was conceptualised to deliberate on its ethical governance and inclusive deployment. It aimed to position India as the first Global South host and co-shaper of global AI frameworks.
Yet the moment unfolded into a spectacle.
Galgotias University stirred a controversy by misrepresenting an AI-equippedrobot as its in-house innovation during the summit. The ensuing fiasco led the organisers to ask the university stall to vacate its pavilion. The university issued multiple statements, ultimately apologising and stating their representative, a woman professor, was “ill-informed” and “not authorised to speak.”
Following this, the conversation quickly drifted away from AI innovation onto the media’s frenzied enthusiasm to cover the scandal, exploding sensational headlines, and unchecked social media opinions - collectively trivialising the Summit in public discourse and turning it into a theatre of accusations.
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The gendered anatomy of public trials
At its most disturbing, the controversy settled on a woman’s body and her competence. Her credibility and legitimacy were dissected in public, and the tone of such scrutiny was moralistic, personal, and deeply insinuating. It reverberated the tired trope that women are either ornamental, ill-informed or undeserving of their platforms. The scrutiny pivoted to her personal character, where her presence, legitimacy, and worthiness were judged. The entire imagination - fixated on whether the woman deserved her platform!
This is not a singular instance. Feminist scholarship has long observed that women in public authority are often treated as embodiments of institutional virtue or failure. Their presence is scrutinised, missteps generalised, and their authority is assumed to be provisional. Especially in moments of crisis, trials of women have always been a symbolic act of restoring order, an easier narrative than confronting structural fragility. This has always been a ritual of gendered accountability, where facts are misplaced by reputation dissection.
In the specific context of the Summit, where AI raises profound questions about bias, power and structural inequality, we failed to interrogate these dynamics and instead enacted them. We gendered the struggle over technological power.
This gendered scrutiny, however, performed a convenient function. It narrowed systemic critique into individual culpability. It displaced attention away from deeper questions like: What does ‘AI readiness’ actually mean? Who defines it? What asymmetries of capital, data and regulatory power shape India's entry into the AI economy? And whose interests ultimately govern the terms on which we participate in this technological future?
And this leads to the actual uncomfortable question that emerged from the entire fiasco: the anxious performance of ‘AI readiness’ by Global South tech research and development.
AI Impact Summit 2026: Altman Calls For Global AI Regulator
BY Ainnie Arif |
