Musk is not worth pandering to

India has good reason to keep satellite communications under the control of operators subject to Indian laws and security oversight

Examples of the pot calling the kettle black do not get more egregious than this. On Thursday, October 8, SpaceX’s trillionaire boss, Elon Musk, who can surely be called the super-oligarch among tech oligarchs, claimed that his Starlink satellite phone services were being blocked by India’s oligarchs.

 

He said on his social media platform X: “Unfortunately, we are being blocked by certain oligarchs in order to maintain their monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people… you can guess who they are…. This is a crime against the people of India”. An X account linked to Mr Musk went on to talk about how over 11,256 villages are without even 4G services as of May 2026.

Rahul Gandhi, currently engaged in climbing barricades and protesting “vote chori”, unwisely appeared to endorse Mr Musk’s claim, with a “Welcome to India” post. The last thing one needs is an Indian politician batting for a foreign oligarch over far less powerful Indian ones.  

Mr Musk is wide off the mark, not because India does not have oligarchs, but because the primary resistance to Starlink is not being driven by Mukesh Ambani of Jio or Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel, India’s telecom biggies, but the Government of India itself. The government is seriously concerned about the security ramifications of handing out satphones by the thousand to entities that could prove to be inimical to India.  

Mr Musk may recall that when Starlink announced its intention to offer services in India, the first partners to tie up with him were the very same oligarchs he now rails against. The Modi government, to prevent a duopoly, has paid out or written off hundreds of crores in order to keep both Bharat Sanchar Nigam and Vodafone alive. If Mr Musk were really keen to serve the last man in India’s far-flung areas, he could easily have bailed out Vodafone himself and entrenched himself in the Indian telecom woodwork. But he didn’t. He wants to enter the Indian market both to make money and build political heft. With X, Grok (his artificial intelligence arm) and Starlink, he would be in a very powerful position to influence Indian politics. 

The reality is that the overall market for satellite communications is likely to be very small initially. The official reason for allowing foreign satcom players to offer services in India is that regular telecom services in India’s interior and hilly regions are either poor or non-existent. But if one assumes that the people in these regions are also relatively poor, the paying market for such services is likely to be weak too — at least in the initial years. 

The real market for satellite communication services (which include direct-to-phone internet services via satellite) will come in the following order: The state (armed forces, central and state police, administrators), followed by  politicians, businessmen, the urban rich and middle classes. The last four, mostly urban dwellers, do not need satphones when broadband Wi-Fi and 5G are already available to them. 

For this category of potential users, a satphone would substantially be a vanity purchase like iPhones or folding mobile phones. But we cannot fail to add the one category that would want satphones as of yesterday: Smugglers and anti-social elements. So the pretence that satellite phones will be used to serve poor Arunachal goatherds is laughable. The rich always make their case by riding on the logic of helping the poor. Mr Musk is not going to give the Ladakhi citizen a satphone at  ₹199 a month rental.  

The second reason why the oligarch argument does not quite hold is that the upfront investment in the business is huge. Both Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani would have liked to ride on Mr Musk’s coattails rather than make those investments themselves. On the other hand, it was the government that nudged Mr Ambani to put up 1,600 near-Earth satellites in order to offer a home-grown alternative before Mr Musk wades in with his big bucks. The delays are probably deliberate on the government’s part, because it does not want Starlink to become so powerful in India before the domestic alternatives are made available. It is not the oligarchs who may be stalling Starlink, but the sovereign, which worries about internal and external security. 

While Starlink has announced that it will comply with India’s security concerns, Mr Musk is a loose cannon with huge political opinions and interests. His Starlink has played a crucial role in the Ukraine-Russia war on the side of the former, and has even been known to pull services to Russians close to the warfront. He backs many Conservative and Right-wing governments in Europe and Latin America, including the now surging Alternative for Germany. 

 He was vociferous in demanding Keir Starmer’s resignation, and calling for a general election in the United Kingdom in January 2025. Mr Musk played a crucial role in consolidating the forces supporting Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential elections, and it was only after he fell out with Mr Trump that his power in Washington ebbed. But in terms of money clout, he is George Soros raised to the power of 10: A businessman with the money and the intent to meddle in the politics of other countries. 

Given the United States’ new-found willingness to slow down India’s economic rise and impede its ability to export more goods and services to America, there is no saying when Mr Musk will be used to needle and deter India. In fact, Mr Musk’s statement on oligarchs may make any Indian concessions to him on Starlink improbable. India has good reason to keep him away as long as possible. 

India’s security concerns are real. Only anarchists will argue otherwise. There is a lot of political churn happening in India, and several sections of society are on the streets for various reasons (opposition parties, farmers, students, quota activists). The police forces in various states often use internet shutdowns to prevent rioting mobs from communicating with one another and making policing impossible. The easy availability of satphones with internet connections would make this method of crowd control impossible.  

Also, the borders in the north and east are unstable, with large tribal and other populations freely moving across the Myanmar border. The availability of satphones in the hands of insurgents is a threat India cannot take lightly, and if we add the possibility of a politically-minded Starlink boss capable of using his power to impact politics in various countries, the delay in granting security clearance to Starlink is not difficult to understand. 

There is a good case for satellite phones being totally in the hands of Indian businessmen who are subject to Indian laws and amenable to sovereign pressure to avoid aiding a breakdown in law and order or helping anti-social elements and insurgents. Keeping Elon Musk out would be an act of sovereign power, not oligarchic pressure. In this writer’s opinion, Mr Musk should never get a satellite licence in India.

 

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The writer is a senior journalist