Musk cries foul in India; government says all three satcom players level

Elon Musk claims "certain oligarchs" are blocking Starlink's entry into India, and the Indian government has told him, in effect, to check the paperwork. All three licensed NGSO satellite operators — Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio Satellite Communications — sit at broadly the same regulatory stage, New Delhi said, calling any suggestion of discrimination "baseless and misconceived".

Musk didn't name names, but he left little to guesswork. "You can guess who they are. This is a crime against the people of India," he wrote on his social platform. He then addressed Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries and father of India's largest mobile operator, as "Prime Minister Ambani". Reliance Jio announced its own LEO constellation plans earlier in 2026.

Musk's argument rests on scale: "Starlink is licensed in over 165 countries and has spent five years complying with every single law and requirement of the government of India, so why still no license? Is Ambani the real boss of India?"

What does the licensing process actually say?

India has awarded three Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) licences: to Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio Satellite Communications. The Reliance Jio subsidiary holds its licence for MEO broadband with SES — separate from the conglomerate's new LEO plans.

Each licensee carries a 20-year GMPCS term plus a five-year IN-SPACe licence for satellite landing rights and in-principle approval for ground-station gateways. Before launch, all three must clear national security conditions, then seek spectrum for gateways and user terminals. "At present, all three entities are broadly at the same regulatory stage," the government said.

The queue behind them is less orderly. Amazon Leo, which started later, holds neither GMPCS nor IN-SPACe authorisation. Reliance Jio's LEO project, announced in April 2026, reportedly has IN-SPACe approval, though PolicyTracker could not confirm this. Whether Jio's existing MEO-based licence even covers a LEO constellation remains unclear.

One Starlink setback is concrete: IN-SPACe rejected its second-generation system application in January 2026. That generation carries the direct-to-device capability India hasn't yet decided how to regulate.

Jio's own satellite maths are ambitious — roughly 1,600 satellites, 23 gateways across India, a first test flight in September 2027, mass deployment in early 2028, 400–450 satellites in orbit by 2030 and full completion by 2035.

How will spectrum be assigned?

Administratively, not by auction. Licensees will pay an annual percentage of service revenue, a figure DoT and TRAI are still haggling over. Candidate bands include Ku, Ka and Q/V for user and feeder links, with L and S bands for mobile satellite user links and C, Ku, Ka, Q/V and UHF for feeders.

Why the security anxiety around Starlink?

The Takshashila Institution, a public policy think tank, framed the core worry in an April 2026 report: "Starlink services may remain illegally active when the government wants them to be halted in an area. Conversely, Starlink services may be halted when the Government needs them to be operational."

Widespread retail Starlink adoption, the report argued, would erode the state's ability to regulate internet access, and relying on a US operator for critical infrastructure risks lost connectivity during a disaster or conflict.

A DoT memorandum from May 2025 added conditions for GMPCS holders:

• real-time monitoring facilities for security agencies
• no Indian user traffic through foreign gateways
• a ban on inter-satellite links, even if Indian gateways fail
• a prohibition on direct device-to-device satellite communication

Takshashila doubts ground-based monitoring can even detect whether a packet transited an ISL. Several conditions rely on trust and self-certification rather than technical enforcement. And once D2D is permitted, "the D2D technology can bypass the entire gateway-dependent architecture that India's current GMPCS conditions are built around," the report says.

Its recommendations include funding Digital Bharat Nidh — the universal service fund's 2023 replacement — favouring joint ventures with Indian entities, building an independent satcom monitoring facility, drafting a D2D framework, and steering Starlink toward disaster relief rather than retail.

Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic arm of the RSS, which sits close to the ruling BJP, went further in October. A senior figure said that if the US threatens Indian imports with tariffs on national security grounds, India would be justified in blocking Starlink over "its genuine national security concerns".

Musk has his complaint on record. The gate he's pushing at, though, is one India says nobody has passed through yet — and the D2D policy decision his second-generation system depends on has no deadline at all.