Bharat is open for business, not for Elon Musk’s bullying

The world’s richest man wants New Delhi to roll out the red carpet for Starlink. When he doesn’t get that, he gets angry. Very angry. He takes to social media to vent his anger. What he forgets in the process is that Bharat is neither Ukraine nor Bangladesh. For Delhi, its national security is non-negotiable.

Maybe Musk epitomises the Trumpian mindset he is operating in. The world’s only trillionaire, in fact, on many counts, seems to be an extension of Donald Trump — brash, arrogant, entitled and convinced that rules are either inapplicable to him or, if applicable, meant to be broken. How else does one explain his extraordinary outburst on ‘X’, accusing New Delhi of blocking Starlink in collusion with “oligarchs”?

The accusation is as reckless as it is revealing. It exposes Musk’s innate inability to accept that a sovereign nation might refuse to bend to his commercial ambitions.

Musk wants to grab Bharat’s vast and rapidly expanding digital market. He is getting desperate precisely because he can see the intense competition at hand. He is therefore angry and in a rush. He is angry not because Delhi has rejected Starlink — which it has not. He is upset simply because Delhi has insisted on regulatory compliance and security scrutiny, as it should for any operator seeking access to critical communications infrastructure.

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Musk, just like Trump, has no time for all this. He wants to bulldoze his way into the Indian market. He seems to believe that economic weight might confer political privilege. That being the world’s richest man entitles him to preferential treatment. That proximity to the American establishment should make foreign governments fall in line.

Delhi, however, is under no obligation to indulge Musk’s tantrums. In fact, Musk’s ill-tempered intervention could prove a spectacular self-goal. For a businessman seeking entry into one of the world’s most sensitive communications markets, publicly questioning the integrity of the host government could backfire magnificently. His outburst only strengthens the argument for caution: can Delhi entrust critical communications infrastructure to a company whose owner treats sovereign governments as adversaries whenever they refuse to accommodate him?

Musk would have been wiser to recognise Bharat’s genuine regulatory and national security concerns instead of inventing an oligarchic conspiracy.

His pitch rests on a familiar American messianic mindset — an extension of the 19th- and 20th-century white man’s burden mentality — that conceals his predatory nature under the guise of rescuing the digitally-deprived masses. He patronisingly promises cheap, fast internet to Bharat’s “least-served” communities, invoking the 11,256 villages still without 4G coverage as evidence of an enormous digital deficit.

The logic may sound superficially compelling, but when examined, the number comes down to less than 4 per cent of Indian villages. Bharat has 6,44,131 villages, according to the Registrar General of India. By May 2025, some 6,29,027 villages, or 97.65 per cent, had mobile connectivity. Of these, 6,23,512 villages — 96.80 per cent of the total — had 4G coverage. If the current trajectory persists, the country could have universal digital connectivity within a decade, with or without Starlink.

Thus, Musk’s tendency to portray Bharat as a digital wilderness awaiting salvation from an American trillionaire is breathtakingly patronising. So, Mr Musk, spare the country the messianic sermon. It does not need rescuing. If anything, Starlink needs rescuing — and Bharat can do precisely that, especially with China already out of bounds.

Musk’s promise of affordable connectivity also runs into an inconvenient reality — economics. Bharat has some of the cheapest mobile data in the world, with the country’s mobile data costs falling by more than 97 per cent over the past decade. The cost of 1 GB of mobile data declined to ₹7.87 in December 2025 from ₹308 in 2014, according to New India Samachar, a government publication. The effective cost of 100 GB of mobile data has plummeted from more than ₹28,000 in 2014 to roughly ₹850 today. One can get an idea of Starlink’s exorbitant pricing from the Bangladeshi experience. When Starlink launched in Bangladesh in May 2025, the interim administration led by Muhammad Yunus hailed it as a breakthrough in bridging the digital divide. But the reality was starkly different, thanks to Starlink’s “prohibitively expensive” plans.

Starlink’s residential package was announced at Tk 6,000 a month (roughly ₹4,200), with a lighter plan costing Tk 4,200 (₹3,000). The equipment required an additional upfront investment of Tk 47,000 (₹38,000). These exorbitantly priced services do not match the social and economic realities of Bangladesh. For millions of ordinary Bangladeshis, particularly those in rural and low-income communities whom Musk intended to target through his technological evangelism, they are unaffordable.

Affordability, however, is only part of Bharat’s dilemma. The bigger concern is national security. Delhi is aware of the dangers of technological dependence on outside entities, more so when that entity is as unpredictable, ambitious and entitled as Elon Musk. Ukraine has already provided a cautionary tale. Starlink has been indispensable to Ukrainian communications since Russia’s invasion.

In 2022, Elon Musk ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast to “hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships”, according to a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson. The biography alleged that Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea.

Imagine Delhi facing a serious security confrontation while depending on foreign-owned satellite infrastructure. Imagine access being restricted because of geopolitical pressure, a commercial dispute or a unilateral corporate decision.

When this is the case, satellite internet ceases to be merely a commercial service. It becomes an instrument of geopolitical power. And Musk has shown little reluctance to wield power beyond the boundaries of his business empire. Remember how he publicly ridiculed the then German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and championed the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). How he called Britain’s 2024 unrest a “civil war” and described it as “inevitable”. And in Brazil and Argentina, he openly chose political sides.

One may or may not agree with Musk’s interventions. That is beside the point. The real issue is the extraordinary concentration of technological leverage an individual would have over a country of which he is not even a citizen. The real issue is that a nation cannot outsource its strategic autonomy to a citizen of another country — far less to a person with the temperament of Elon Musk.

There is another irony here, one that makes Musk’s accusations about Indian oligarchs particularly absurd. The United States has spent years restricting Chinese telecommunications giants such as Huawei on national security grounds. Washington argues that critical communications infrastructure must not expose America to unacceptable foreign influence. If Washington can keep Huawei at arm’s length, Delhi can certainly examine Starlink under a microscope. If the US can defend its digital sovereignty, so can Bharat.

If Musk is genuinely committed to open markets and unfettered competition, perhaps he should begin by demanding genuinely equal treatment for Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers in the US. This would be a fascinating test of his free-market convictions.

Tesla has benefited disproportionately from American barriers affecting Chinese competitors.

Musk himself presides over a business empire that has benefited from his position as an American oligarch. This makes his denunciation of Indian ‘oligarchs’ absurd and farcical. He rails against alleged economic privilege while having enjoyed such advantages for decades.

Before Elon Musk lectures Bharat about oligarchs, he might consider looking in the mirror. This will help him discover that the oligarch he is searching for is staring right back at him. As for Starlink, he should better know that Bharat is open for business. It is not open for sale.

(Utpal Kumar is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)