New Delhi: Billionaire Elon Musk has a lot going on, and it seems he’s beginning to get his wires crossed. He is suing the Indian government over content regulation and censorship of X—a “surprise move” for someone trying to negotiate access for Tesla and Starlink in India, reports Bloomberg. His social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has accused the Indian government of arbitrarily issuing takedown notices and asked the Karnataka High Court to get it to adhere to the law when issuing such orders.
“Musk’s lawsuit reflects growing tensions between internet firms and the nationalistic government of one of the world’s largest democracies,” Shruti Mahajan and Sankalp Phartiyal report in ‘Elon Musk Sues India’s Government Over Takedown Orders on X.’
The move coincides with growing US-India tensions amid the threat of reciprocal tariffs looming after President Donald Trump set the 2 April deadline.
Musk has been trying to launch his Starlink satellite internet service in India for a while but has been stonewalled by regulatory clearances. These difficulties appeared to be lifting last week when both Airtel and Jio announced that they would be partnering with Starlink to launch in India. Tesla has also been getting ready to ship a few thousand cars to a Mumbai port, marking its long-awaited debut in India.
The government of India has yet to respond, but it presents a sticky situation where political and business interests have collided.
Talking about yet another complex relationship, an editorial in Dawn accuses India of having a ‘Victim complex,’ discussing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comments to American podcaster Lex Fridman.
“While the relationship has been marked by great complexity, with mostly lows and a few highs since partition, Mr Modi painted Pakistan as the villain of the piece, with India the innocent victim of Islamabad’s conniving schemes,” the editorial says. “The reality is quite different. Mistakes have been made by both sides, but in the recent past it has been India that has been resisting Pakistan’s overtures for peace.”
It admits that “Pakistan indeed has its flaws, and mistakes have been made by the state in the past, such as letting certain groups indulge in cross-border adventurism.”
But, it adds, “times have changed, and these are matters of the past”.
The editorial goes on to list all the ways in which, it alleges, India is actively sabotaging peaceful relations, from the ICC Champions Trophy “debacle” and encouraging “cross-border terrorism” in Balochistan to “deploying assassins” in Canada and the US targeting Sikh activists and to “isolating” Pakistan on the global stage. “Therefore, Indian foreign policy, particularly under the BJP’s watch, is not exactly guided by ahimsa (non-violence), but by active meddling in the affairs of sovereign states,” Dawn says.
“If New Delhi is sincere about bringing peace to South Asia, let it agree to an unconditional dialogue with Islamabad about all irritants. If India has plaints against Pakistan, this country also has a long list of grievances against its eastern neighbour. The only way to bring lasting peace is to launch uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue to address all issues.”
“Is India ready?” the editorial asks.
The Economist unpacks another aspect of this controversial podcast—Modi cosying up to Trump, whom he spoke warmly about on the show. Trump shared a link of the podcast and Modi thanked him after joining his social media platform, TruthSocial.
“In many ways it seems a particularly big moment for America-India relations. The two countries have been getting closer for two decades,” says the article ‘Why the Indian diaspora has not yet embraced Donald Trump.’
“But now, for the first time, America’s intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, is of Hindu faith, and the second lady, Usha Vance, is of Indian origin. And the strongmen leading the two countries clearly have a rapport. But one group remains unmoved by Mr Trump, for now at least: India’s diaspora.”
So far, MAGA has limited appeal to 5.2 million Indian Americans, the article observes. While it admits that data from the Carnegie Endowment—which ThePrint has also reported about—shows that the number of Democrats within the diaspora has come down, it is still largely wary of Trump.
“This seems odd, not least as Mr Trump has gone out of his way to charm America’s Hindus,” The Economist writes, listing high-profile hires from the community like FBI director Kash Patel, Kush Desai as deputy press secretary, and assistant attorney-general for civil rights Harmeet Dhillon.
“Even so, many Indian-Americans are concerned with issues that Mr Trump is unlikely to solve. Fully 82 percent want stricter gun laws and 77 percent think climate change is important. At the end of Mr Trump’s first term only 33 percent approved of his handling of the India-America relationship,” the article says.
In a separate article, The Economist turns its attention to why ‘India is obsessed with giving its people unique IDs’. After a quick summary of Aadhaar’s success in India, the article says that this “epidemic of IDs is partly” the result of this success.
“Digital oversight cannot eradicate corruption. But it does make it more difficult,” The Economist writes. “Yet many new IDs lack any such underpinnings. Much of it is branding. Any organisation that deals with people manages its relationships in databases, with each individual assigned a numerical identifier. But after Aadhaar made unique IDs sexy, bureaucrats at obscure departments started bandying the term about and building their own ID systems.” And all these new IDs require funding. They also “occupy the energies of officials and techies, and test the patience of citizens,” The Economist observes.
“Nandan Nilekani, Aadhaar’s architect, envisioned it as ‘an open identity-verification system that can be plugged into any application’. Officials have taken from it the opposite lesson: that their department must have its own Aadhaar,” the article ends, offering a damning conclusion. “They are thereby recreating the very problems it was meant to solve: government wastage, duplicative demands for data and a baffling array of IDs to keep track of. In the guise of cutting bureaucracy, the Indian state is instead entrenching it.”
Meanwhile, another editorial from another neighbour offers some sage advice: ‘India can leverage opportunities in China to fuel its own development.’
“A strategy worth considering is investing in the production of intermediate goods in China, taking advantage of China’s mature industrial ecosystem and its accumulated capabilities and strengths in producing these goods,” Global Times writes.
By investing in China, it says, Indian enterprises could “capitalise on the established advantages there to supply the Indian manufacturing sector with a continuous stream of high-quality, low-cost intermediate products, thereby propelling the development of manufacturing in India”.
This could also help India export more raw materials for intermediate goods to China. Thereby fostering mutual growth and further integrating the regional supply chain.
“In the long run, actively enhancing the industrial complementarity between the two countries, and ensuring that complementarity prevails over competition, is an effective way to advance China-India economic development,” Global Times writes. “Throughout this process, economic cooperation is beneficial in fostering mutual trust, and an increase in mutual trust, in turn, facilitates further collaboration.”
It’s up to India, then, to capitalise on China’s development and “high-level openness”. The trick to bolstering the Indian economy is to bolster China’s, Global Times says.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)