ELON Musk spent the second week of October turning a regulatory delay into a morality play. On October 7, he complained that “certain oligarchs” were keeping Starlink out of India. A day later, he asked whether Mukesh Ambani was “the real boss of India”. By October 9, he was addressing “Prime Minister Ambani” in a sarcastic apology. The story had everything a social media feed wants: a foreign innovator, a domestic tycoon and an observant bureaucracy in between.
The record does not support the plot. Starlink received its telecom licence in June 2025 and its space-regulator authorisation a month later. Jio Satellite and Eutelsat OneWeb are licensed too, and Union Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia says none of the three has security clearance. All hold provisional spectrum. The Digital Communications Commission has set charges at 5% of revenue, 4% in rural areas, and the Union Cabinet is yet to approve them.
On the one big policy fight, Jio wanted spectrum auctioned and lost; the government chose administrative allocation, as Starlink had lobbied. On October 16, Reliance said it welcomed Starlink’s competition and that Jio’s own satellite service is stuck in the same queue.
The key hurdle to Starlink’s launch is security clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The reasons lie in the technology and the mandatory regulatory process, not in Musk’s temperament. Satellite broadband is different from the copper and fibre networks India’s security apparatus learned to supervise. Its coverage is defined in software.

A region can be lit up, throttled or switched off by an engineer thousands of kilometres away, and the host government may learn of it afterwards.
Musk showed this in 2022 when he declined to extend coverage for a Ukrainian operation near Crimea. He showed it again this February, when SpaceX and Kyiv cut off every unregistered terminal in Ukraine to stop Russian forces using the network to guide drones. Last week brought another demonstration. On October 13, Ukrainian forces found their military Starshield terminals cut off above about 160 km/h, without warning. Drones lost their links and missions were cancelled.

Link: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/starlink-and-the-question-of-who-controls-the-switch/