By Andy Mukherjee

What’s a Latin American hairdresser doing in a local election 9,000 miles away?

At a press conference in New Delhi last week, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition, posed just that question, as he filled the screen behind him with excerpts of electoral rolls from a state poll last year. Each of the 22 women on the list had a different name, like Seema, Sweety and Saraswati. But they all carried the same stock picture of a young woman. Gandhi identified her as a Brazilian fashion model.

Larissa Nery, a 29-year-old from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, later confirmed that the photo was indeed hers, though she is a hairdresser, not a fashion model. She has, nonetheless, become an overnight sensation in India, the face of what Gandhi claims is an organized scheme to subve

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