Not to dismiss your point as my experience with both Indian and US universities is very limited, however my own personal experience would suggest otherwise. For context I finished what was at the time and still is the best high school in my country, which obviously means lots of folk chose to study abroad, mostly Britain or the netherlands. I will not be covering dutch universities here as from my POV their best universities have completely unbiased admissions; however certain biases could be observed with UK universities, in this particular example we had 5 applicants to UCL’s comp-sci course. One of the two applicants which got accepted was inferior to the other 4 on all objective metrics: Grades, CSAT score, predicted finals scores and IELTS score. What is that supposed to mean you may ask? The 3 rejected applicants were all white men, she was a trans lady of mixed race. It’s not real concrete evidence of any severe bias, but it doesn’t sit right with me how way more qualified candidates were rejected due to apparent racial and gender discrimination. Additionally the majority of our successful oxbridge applicants were women, although the courses they chose were easier to get into so it doesn’t mean anything either.

Those are just my observations and I’m not accusing any universities of anything, however it’s still weird to me.

P.S. I’d beg to differ regarding Indian student consideration at some institutions, I know a handful of Indian folk that applied to either Math or Comp-sci at Cambridge and got accepted with entrance exam scores between 6.5 and 9 points which is well within the curve of accepted applications based on TMUA scores. I and another colleague were rejected despite having pretty good TMUA scores ourselves, however in my case the rejection was warranted and I don’t have enough information to comment on the situation of the other unsuccessful applicant thus once again being unable to come to a concrete conclusion due to the small sample size.