When I send JSON ingestion specification to Druid overlord API I get this response:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2019 11:44:18 GMT
Server: Jetty(9.4.10.v20180503)
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
{
    "error": "Instantiation of [simple type, class org.apache.druid.indexing.common.task.IndexTask] value failed: null"
}
If I change index task type to index_parallel, then I get this: 
{
    "error": "Instantiation of [simple type, class org.apache.druid.indexing.common.task.batch.parallel.ParallelIndexSupervisorTask] value failed: null"
}
Using same ingestion spec through Druid's web UI works fine.
Here is the ingestion spec that I use(slightly modified to hide sensitive data):
{
    "type": "index_parallel",
    "dataSchema": {
      "dataSource": "daily_xport_test",
      "granularitySpec": {
        "type": "uniform",
        "segmentGranularity": "MONTH",
        "queryGranularity": "NONE",
        "rollup": false
      },
      "parser": {
        "type": "string",
        "parseSpec": {
          "format": "json",
          "timestampSpec": {
            "column": "dateday",
            "format": "auto"
          },
          "dimensionsSpec": {
            "dimensions": [
              {
                "type": "string",
                "name": "id",
                "createBitmapIndex": true
              },
              {
                "type": "long",
                "name": "clicks_count_total"
              },
              {
                "type": "long",
                "name": "ctr"
              },
              "deleted",
              "device_type",
              "target_url"
            ]
          }
        }
      }
    },
    "ioConfig": {
      "type": "index_parallel",
      "firehose": {
        "type": "static-google-blobstore",
        "blobs": [
          {
            "bucket": "data-test",
            "path": "/sample_data/daily_export_18092019/000000000000.json.gz"
          }
        ],
        "filter": "*.json.gz$"
      },
      "appendToExisting": false
    },
    "tuningConfig": {
      "type": "index_parallel",
      "maxNumSubTasks": 1,
      "maxRowsInMemory": 1000000,
      "pushTimeout": 0,
      "maxRetry": 3,
      "taskStatusCheckPeriodMs": 1000,
      "chatHandlerTimeout": "PT10S",
      "chatHandlerNumRetries": 5
    }
  }
Overlord API URI looks like this:
http://host:8081/druid/indexer/v1/task
HTTPie command to send API request:
http --print=Hhb  POST http://host:8081/druid/indexer/v1/task < test_spec.json
Also, I get the same issue if I try to send ingestion task using DruidHook class in Airflow