Looks more like a fluke of methodology on statcounter's site.
Cause all of the points that you've listed also apply to many other countries, but they don't get as much of an increase as rapidly as India.
Plus, things like PoS terminals, most govt PCs etc, won't even count towards that.
Laptops with preinstalled ElementaryOS definitely aren't big enough stimulus for such growth, cause it would also bump other regions.
Just a little speculative theory: gotta look at it backwards. The target install base for statcounter are a less educated (e.g. more vulnerable) userbase that doesn't know that google analytics exists.
Scammers started to use Linux more frequently. Counters are located on real sites via paid plugin (yeah...), which makes the website owners an even more likely target for scammers or automated scrapers (cause perps now know that you have at least some $ to waste on this garbage, or your website has something worth of investigating/cloning).
And since India has the largest global share of such perps (due to its population size and some other factors), it inadvertently bumps stats for Linux specifically for India.
Just from a personal experience: we have a couple of small company websites with highly specialized stuff (and highly regional) and very little "real" traffic. Most of the "total" traffic doesn't even come from our region(mostly from India and Russia). Spam is a bit different(origins are usually e-mails or gateways in other countries), but on occasion if I did some OSInt - it ended up being some script-kiddie from India who didn't even bother to hide his trail (to the point of me being able to find their Facebook or LinkedIn page, or which University they went to etc.).
gs.statcounter.com
indianexpress.com
