The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India issued today (March 18, 2025) the following statement:
Recently Elon Musk’s Starlink has tied up with Jio and Airtel to provide high-speed satellite-based internet services in the country. There are reports that DOT (Dept. of Telecommunications, Govt. of India) has agreed to satellite Spectrum Elon Musk’s Starlink has entered a business tie up with Jio and Airtel’s to offer high resources to Starlink to facilitate this tie up. This rises serious national security and other issues.
CPI is of the opinion that the decision violates the Supreme Court’s verdict in the 2G case that spectrum is a scarce resource and cannot be allocated to private players. The allocation should be the telecom syndicate formed by Starlink with Jio and Airtel only through open, transparent auction. Any private deal for allocating spectrum would be a violation of the law of the land. Allocation of vital Satellite Spectrum data to a foreign space firm completely exposes nation’s important security maps, defines locations, national resources and peoples call data. It should be noted that Elon Musk’s Starlink is also a service provider to Pentagon and NASA, USA. This imprudent act not only exposes our strategic defense data to Pentagon but also data of ISRO. Recent withdrawal of Starlink services to Ukrainian army in the ongoing war with Russia cautions us before entrusting our strategic Spectrum data to foreign firms. Here, it should be mentioned that ISRO was established in 1960’s by visionaries such as Vikram Sarabai and other scientists to provide telecommunications, finding mineral resources, weather, agriculture and space explorations towards building a sovereign Indian nation.
India under the leadership of Narendra Modi is completely surrendering to the dictates of US President Trump and his associate and agreeing to facilitate business interests of Mr. Elon Musk.
CPI wants our union government to exercise caution and immediately withdraw allotment of Spectrum resources to American space firm STARLINK.
Press Release