India rejects Musk's claim that oligarchs are blocking Starlink's launch

Ministry rebuts Musk's accusation

India's Ministry of Communications has publicly rejected Elon Musk's claim that Starlink is being treated unfairly in the country, an unusual exchange between a government regulator and one of the world's most prominent tech executives over one of the largest untapped internet markets.

According to TechCrunch, Musk said on Wednesday that unnamed "oligarchs" were blocking SpaceX's satellite internet service to protect their "monopolistic chokehold" on India, calling the situation a "crime against the people of India." He offered no names or evidence to support the accusation.

Within hours, the ministry issued a statement describing India's satellite communications framework as "fair and non-discriminatory." It said Starlink and two other licensed satellite operators are all at "broadly the same regulatory stage," and that each is undergoing security assessments that must be finished before any of them can apply for spectrum, the radio frequencies satellites rely on to deliver service.

A market five years in the making

Starlink's attempt to enter India stretches back to 2021, when SpaceX first tried to launch the service. That early effort stumbled: TechCrunch reports the company had to refund equipment preorders in early 2022 after the Indian government objected to it taking bookings for satellite internet before obtaining the required licenses.

Since then SpaceX has built up its local presence. It has partnered with Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, India's two biggest telecom operators, to distribute the service, appointed former Payoneer executive Prabhakar Jayakumar to lead Indian operations in December, and assembled a local team ahead of a launch. Commercial service has still not started, despite India counting more than a billion internet subscribers.

Musk's comments arrived just hours after Lauren Dreyer, Starlink's vice president of business operations, appeared at the India Mobile Congress conference in New Delhi. There she struck a cooperative tone, telling attendees "We stand ready to serve India" and linking the company's ambitions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's goal of universal connectivity.

Starlink says it has already installed more than 20 gateway sites, the ground stations that connect satellites to the internet, along with hundreds of antennas across India, and has adapted its operations to meet the country's regulatory, security and data-sovereignty requirements. The company frames its network as a complement to India's terrestrial telecom infrastructure rather than a replacement.

Old fights over spectrum

Tension between Starlink and India's incumbents is not new. The two sides previously clashed over how satellite spectrum should be handed out: Starlink pushed for administrative assignment, while Reliance Jio argued for an auction, an approach that would likely have raised Starlink's cost of entry. India ultimately sided with Starlink's position and chose administrative allocation.

Meanwhile, Jio and Airtel are hedging their bets. Even as they agreed to distribute Starlink, both are developing satellite internet offerings of their own: Jio is working with satellite operator SES, and Airtel is a major backer of Eutelsat OneWeb, another licensed satellite operator in India.

There is still no date for a commercial launch. In a sign of momentum elsewhere in the region, TechCrunch notes that Starlink introduced Starlink Mobile, a service that connects ordinary phones to satellites, in neighboring Bangladesh this week. Starlink, the Ministry of Communications, Jio and Airtel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Why it matters

The dispute goes beyond rhetoric. India is one of the world's largest internet markets, and satellite broadband is widely seen as a way to reach rural and remote users that fiber and mobile networks struggle to cover. The ministry's statement signals that public pressure will not shortcut the security clearance process, setting the expectation that Starlink's launch depends on completing the same checks as its rivals. For SpaceX, which has poured years of work, local partnerships and physical infrastructure into India, the wait continues. For India's regulators, the episode is a test of how the country balances a high-profile foreign entrant against domestic incumbents that are building competing satellite businesses of their own.