New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Twitter and Tesla owner Elon Musk during his three-day state visit to the United States beginning Tuesday while the billionaire looks to finalise a factory in India by the end of this year.
Previously, the duo had met in 2015 during Modi’s visit to the Tesla Motors factory in California.
In January 2021, Musk had confirmed Tesla’s entry into India with two words on Twitter – “As promised”. He wrote them in response to an article titled “Tesla Is Preparing for a Robust Entry into India, a Multi-Billion Dollar Market”. The story was posted by tesmanian.com, a website that gives regular updates on Tesla and SpaceX.
In May next year, Tesla Inc put on hold plans to sell electric cars in the country, abandoned a search for showroom space and reassigned some of its domestic team after failing to secure lower import taxes. Instead of going for outright manufacturing, Musk had wanted to test the India market with imports first, but the company was daunted by India’s import duties, which can go up to 100 percent.
Breaking his silence, Musk tweeted that Tesla would not put a manufacturing plant in a location “where we are not allowed first to sell & service cars”. Responding to another user, he said: “We are waiting for government approval.”
Musk’s tweet came days after Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said at an event that it was not a “good proposition” for India if the billionaire wanted to manufacture in China and sell cars here.
“Our request to him is to come to India and manufacture here. We have no problems. The vendors are available, we offer all kinds of technology and because of that, Musk can reduce the cost. India is a huge market and offers good export opportunities too. Musk can export Tesla cars from India,” Gadkari had said.
However, in May this year, it was reported that Tesla was looking for a factory to build electric cars for domestic sale and export. Visiting Tesla executives apparently did not discuss lower import taxes with Indian officials but only proposed setting up a new factory, albeit without specifying a location or investment.
Incidentally, this will also be Modi’s first confab with Elon Musk after the billionaire’s takeover of social media platform Twitter last year.
The meeting will be merely weeks after Twitter’s former owner Jack Dorsey opened a can of worms in an interview and questioned press freedom in India.
Dorsey alleged that the Indian government threatened to shut the platform, raid employees’ houses in the country and requested the removal of several tweets and accounts linked to the farmers’ protest in 2020-21.
In an interview with a US-based YouTube channel, Dorsey said the platform was also asked to censor journalists critical of the government.
India vehemently denied the allegations, with IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar tweeting: “This is an outright lie… Perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.”
He added: “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shutdown’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it.”
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