Prateek Waghre is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

The India-U.S. relationship is in a transitional phase where, as Tanvi Madan—senior fellow at The Brookings Institution—puts it, “the only constant is volatility.” Differences over trade, tariffs, India’s oil trade with Russia, and the nature of US involvement in the India-Pakistan conflict earlier this year have intensified the debate about “technological sovereignty” in India. These tensions take on added significance amid broader global shifts, including the United States’ dominance-oriented foreign and trade policies, and the ongoing US-China rivalry, which continues to sharpen and is now increasingly blurring the lines between US tech giants' business and policy interests and the Trump Administration’s.

During his Independence Day address on August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out that Indians were “working on the world's platforms,” whether it was “social media or any other platform,” and urged the country’s youth to build “our own platforms.” While calls to build products in India, or to assert greater control over them, are often made in the course of regular public discourse, explicit references to social media in this context are uncommon for the Prime Minister.

Approximately three weeks before the address, on July 22, Microsoft suspended services to Nayara Energy after the European Union placed it on a list of sanctioned entities. This led to Nayara Energy contesting the suspension of services in the Delhi High Court. Microsoft later restored access, claiming it happened due to “an automated ‘legacy’ compliance system,” but stated in court that it could not guarantee continued service. This episode sparked another round of conversations about India’s reliance on technological value chains it does not control, and the vulnerability that creates for the country. Commentary from many users on X described it as a “wake-up call” for India.

A turn toward homegrown tech?

It is unclear to what extent the Prime Minister’s comments about the need for India to build its own platforms were catalyzed specifically by the Nayara-Microsoft situation, or by the broader shift in India-US relations. In the months since his address, some Union Government ministers have cited his remarks to promote the use of what they described as “swadeshi” or indigenous products and services. Many of the products and services they recommended came from the same company, as the following examples illustrate.

In September, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced on X that he would be switching to Zoho’s documents suite. Notably, several commenters on his post called him out for continuing to use other American tech products. Over the next few weeks, Mr. Vaishnaw would further post about meeting the Zoho team and to promote the use of Mappls, a navigation/mapping service by MapMyIndia, that serves as an alternative to Google Maps.

The Minister for Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, also posted about Arattai (also developed by Zoho), positioning it as an alternative to WhatsApp (Arattai does not currently support end-to-end encryption for text messages but claims that it will be introduced in the near future). The Ministry for Education went a step further, issuing a memorandum titled “Strengthening Digital Sovereignty” that directed its officers to use Zoho’s suite of applications.

In October, Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah said that he moved to Zoho Mail, in a post that also included a tongue-in-cheek nod to President Donald Trump’s signature style of thanking people for their attention. A search on X shows that a number of other BJP politicians made similar announcements. The Hindureported that over 12 lakh (1.2 million) union government employees’ emails were migrated to Zoho’s platform. In 2023, Zoho had participated in a tender process, but a number of the services were not being used.

It should be noted that neither suspicion of foreign companies nor the promotion, or at times, even anointing of domestic alternatives, is without precedent. Several examples from recent years illustrate this trend. In 2023, the CEO of MapMyIndia (referenced earlier) accused the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) of taking policy positions that were “anti-India.” The controversy, stemming from IAMAI’s internal critique of a Parliamentary Committee report calling for government intervention against anti-competitive practices, eventually led to changes in the association’s governing council, with representatives from global technology companies mostly replaced by executives from domestic firms.

The Democracy Perception Index 2024 found that nearly 75% of survey respondents from India believed that large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook threatened democracy in the country. Successive ministers at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) have at times pressured or “jawboned” technology firms both, subtly and directly. In September, while dismissing X’s petition challenging what it described as the government’s misuse of takedown powers, the Karnataka High Court remarked, “American thought cannot be transplanted into Indian soil.”

In 2021, amid a face-off with X over its content moderation decisions pertaining to the farm law protests and the notification of the IT Rules 2021, a number of government departments and ministers created accounts on Koo, which was envisioned as a multi-lingual home-grown micro-blogging alternative to Twitter. Despite the inorganic, if temporary, push from various parts of the Indian state, Koo never quite displaced X as a significant hub for political advocacy and discussion in India. It suspended its operations in mid-2024, and its decision to do so was, strikingly, announced on LinkedIn by one of its co-founders.

In August 2023, MeitY announced the “Indian Web Browser Development Challenge.” One of the conditions of the challenge was to trust a root certifying authority from India whose certificates had been revoked by Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in 2014 after it was found to be issuing unauthorized digital certificates for Google domains. That such an untrusted authority was a precondition should have been a major cause of concern. To make matters worse, two of the three winners were accused of repurposing and rebranding existing code. The third, and overall winner of the challenge, was a browser from Zoho, which itself faced accusations of violatinglicensing terms.

On artificial intelligence too, India is among a host of countries seeking “sovereign AI,” which, depending on the context, can refer to control/ownership of physical infrastructure, datasets, foundation models, compute, access to talent, and more. Some commentators describe it as a “strategic imperative,” while others see India as a “use-case capital.” The IndiaAI Mission’s call for expressions of interest in developing foundation models received over 500 proposals. As journalist Shadma Shaikh reports, the effort is not without its challenges, including a lack of multilingual data sets, compute infrastructure, and adoption; it has also sparked controversy over model openness and debates over tradeoffs such as fine-tuning open source models.

Balancing digital sovereignty and market pragmatism

There are other forces pulling in the opposite direction of tech sovereignty, especially as trade negotiations continue. In early 2025, India withdrew a 6% equalization levy on digital advertising services, after it had done away with a 2% levy on e-commerce in August 2024.

In August 2025, responding to a question in Parliament about the status of the draft Digital Competition Bill (DCB), the Ministry of Corporate Affairs stated further that more market studies were required “considering that (ex-ante regulation) is in nascent [sic] stage of implementation.” Reports also suggested that a new draft of the bill may not include such provisions. While the US administration did not appear to be overtly pressuring India in a similar manner as the EU, the ministry’s updated position does seem to signal a shift in its earlier stance, as well as those of various committees and the competition regulator.

To be fair, support for ex-ante provisions appeared to have been mixed at best. Yet, as past debates over the IT Rules, Data Protection Act, and Telecommunications Act have shown, public support has not always been a factor in swaying the union government. (Disclosure: I participated in a call for comments on DCB, producing a submission that raised the need for further study of the ex-ante approach and expressed concerns about the competition regulator having the resources and capacity to enforce them.)

Amid this ongoing push and pull, Google recently announced plans to establish its largest “AI hub” outside the US, in partnership with Adani Group and Airtel, along with an investment of USD 15 bn. So far, the discussion around this announcement has largely focused on innovation and economic growth, rather than on the geopolitical risks or sovereignty considerations that one might have expected in the current environment. Perhaps this stems from a perception that equates physical presence with control.

Sovereignty for all or reshuffling the axes of internet power?

To paraphrase Mallory Knodell’s comment on a recent episode of the Tech Policy Press podcast about internet openness, when large centralized companies and their operations define the online experience for hundreds of millions of people, the very premise of openness is diluted. Their increasing servility, opportunistic or otherwise, to the arbitrary exercise of executive power in the US only amplifies the risks of this concentration globally.

At the other end of this spectrum, states are seeking to impose varying degrees of control over the internet. Often, these manifest as restrictions on information flows, which have consequences for civil liberties such as speech, expression, dissent, and the exchange of ideas in society. And, in a time when both geopolitical and domestic actors, state and non-state alike, cynically exploit open societies to exacerbate polarization and dehumanization, calls for greater control might seem appealing. However, it is vital that attempts to curb the concentration of power and resources of one set of actors do not merely transfer those same powers to another set. On the contrary, the goal should be to dissipate dominance, in general.

In the case of Zoho’s Arratai, the desire to find an alternative to WhatsApp is understandable, particularly from the standpoint of dispersing power. While Zoho has been successful as a bootstrapped, private SaaS provider, whether it can step into the role of a rights-affirming alternative to multinational technology companies is an open question. There are some reasons to be concerned. Amid the conversation about end-to-end encryption support and privacy that Arattai’s adoption sparked, Zoho’s founder and chief scientist expressed a position that appeared to conflate privacy and secrecy. Additionally, while the company’s “vow” not to mine personal data is commendable, it is not, as some commentators point out, a guarantee that such practices cannot or will not occur, whether due to a shift in policy, security practices, or future acquisitions.

Although Zoho’s business realities are complicated, the October social media statement from its founder that “Any company operating in a jurisdiction promising to protect a secret rebel against their own government is making a false promise” is troubling in India’s prevailing political environment. It again raises the question of where the locus of control lies versus where it should be.

It is not that alternative pathways to reduce concentration do not exist. Free and open source software (FOSS), though not without its own challenges, is an approach that many can choose. Kailash Nadh, one of the founders of the FOSS United Foundation (and CTO of Zerodha), has argued that for India to achieve technological self-determination, it needed to “publicly acknowledge” FOSS, and invest “time, effort and resources into” it. In late August, perhaps in a nod to the Microsoft-Nayara situation, LibreOffice positioned itself as a “Strategic Asset for Governments and Enterprises Focused on Digital Sovereignty and Privacy.” When it comes to information distribution and consumption, decentralized social networks and ideas such as “middleware” have existed for several years, but have yet to gain traction in India’s policy discourse.

It should be acknowledged that neither of these approaches is a panacea for the complex socio-politico-economic problems that are manifested and amplified on the internet, and that the dispersion of power may itself produce new consequences. Such issues have always required interventions that go far beyond the technological layer, where most of our attention, often to the detriment of other options, currently remains focused.

Conversations about “internet sovereignty” should not mistakenly assume that the exercise of sovereign state power over corporations will necessarily translate into greater agency for its people. In fact, based on the current trajectory, this contestation is leading to a loss of human agency, and that’s where the real challenge lies.