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By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 2:16:04 pm

SpaceX’s IPO and India’s Sovereignty

The record-breaking $1.75 trillion IPO underscores a new reality that nations which do not control critical digital infrastructure risk ceding part of their sovereignty. Last week, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising $75 billion at a staggering valuation of $1.75 trillion. That single offering surpassed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $25.6 billion by a factor of three. India’s defence budget for FY 2025-26 was Rs. 6.81 lakh crore, approximately $78.57 billion, according to...

SpaceX’s IPO and India’s Sovereignty

The record-breaking $1.75 trillion IPO underscores a new reality that nations which do not control critical digital infrastructure risk ceding part of their sovereignty. Last week, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising $75 billion at a staggering valuation of $1.75 trillion. That single offering surpassed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $25.6 billion by a factor of three. India’s defence budget for FY 2025-26 was Rs. 6.81 lakh crore, approximately $78.57 billion, according to the Union Budget. SpaceX raised the near-equivalent of that annual allocation in one day. The investors who participated were not buying into a rocket company. They were pricing control over satellite infrastructure, global internet access, launch capability, and an integrated AI platform at a level exceeding the GDP of most countries. Roughly 30 percent of the shares, worth approximately $22.5 billion, went to retail investors, three times the proportion typical of a US listing. India has no private entity in this category. What SpaceX actually controls Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet division, operated approximately 7,000 active satellites globally as of early 2026. It counts over nine million subscribers worldwide, and following a 2026 merger, SpaceX also owns xAI, the developer of the Grok AI system. A company that controls satellite connectivity, launch capacity, and a frontier AI model occupies a position no regulator has previously had to classify. It is not a telecom operator, not a defence contractor, and not a technology platform. It is all three at once, under common ownership. In June 2025, SpaceX received authorisation from India’s Department of Telecommunications, followed by a licence from IN-SPACe in July 2025. As of June 2026, Starlink’s commercial operations in India remain pending, with the company in active discussions with the Government of India on security clearances, a process slowed by concerns linked to Starlink terminal use in the Iran conflict. That delay is itself revealing. A foreign company’s service continuity in India depends on negotiations that India does not fully control. Satellite communications, launch systems, and AI-integrated data infrastructure are the functional equivalents of roads and electricity grids in a digital economy. States that built those grids in the twentieth century retained control over access, pricing, and service continuity. States that depend on foreign corporations for digital infrastructure in the twenty-first century do not. The dependence question is already live for India India’s digital public infrastructure, covering Aadhaar, UPI, and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, processes billions of transactions monthly. Aadhaar covers nearly the entire adult population, and UPI carries the bulk of India’s retail digital payments. The system’s design is sound: public architecture, state-controlled data governance, open standards. The next connectivity layer is the problem. TRAI data shows rural internet penetration at 44.2 percent as of March 2024, with only 3.8 percent of rural households connected through high-speed fixed infrastructure. Approximately 630 million Indians remain offline, with primary barriers being awareness, affordability, and limited local-language content, according to the Kantar ICUBE 2024 survey. That gap will not close through terrestrial fibre rollout alone. Satellite broadband, through Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb, or Amazon’s Project Kuiper, will carry a large share of that load over the next decade. None of these are Indian entities. Their pricing decisions, service continuity choices, and data routing practices sit outside Indian jurisdiction. A farmer in Chhattisgarh receiving crop advisory data through a satellite connection does not know that a pricing decision made in California affects whether that signal arrives tomorrow. She will notice only when it stops. Foreign private capital has built connectivity infrastructure in India before. Reliance Jio brought down mobile data costs after its 2016 launch, extending internet access to hundreds of millions of Indians who had not been able to afford it before. Jio’s rollout also created large-scale domestic employment in network maintenance, retail, and customer service, jobs that remain within India’s economy. Private investment in connectivity is not a threat to sovereignty. Structural Gap The difference with SpaceX is structural. Jio operates under Indian law, pays taxes in India, employs Indian engineers, and answers to Indian regulators when disputes arise. Its towers and fibre sit on Indian soil. Starlink’s constellation orbits at 550 kilometres, outside any single national jurisdiction. Under the Telecommunications Act 2023, existing Starlink operators in India continue under the legacy Unified Licence framework, with their licences remaining valid. But no Indian regulatory instrument contains a binding service continuity obligation for satellite operators. If Starlink suspends Indian operations, no domestic legal mechanism compels continuation or requires a managed transition for the users left without service. The $1.75 trillion valuation amplifies this structural gap. India’s external debt stood at $736.3 billion at end-March 2025, according to the Reserve Bank of India. SpaceX’s market valuation now exceeds India’s total external debt by a wide margin. A corporation at that scale does not face the same regulatory friction as a domestic operator. It does not need to negotiate from a position of dependence. India’s satellite communications framework, updated through the Indian Space Policy 2023 and the Telecommunications Act 2023, governs licensing and spectrum allocation in detail. It does not contain binding service continuity or exit-transition obligations for foreign satellite operators. That gap needs closing through explicit licence conditions before Starlink and its competitors reach commercial scale in India. India’s Semiconductor Mission has made genuine progress. Pilot production started in three plants in 2025, and the government confirmed that four plants commenced commercial production in 2026. Kaynes Semicon’s OSAT unit in Sanand reached commercial production in March 2026. India also inaugurated its first 3-nanometer chip design centres in Noida and Bengaluru in 2025, a step toward design capability even as fabrication capacity remains limited. These are real milestones, not announcements. They do not yet constitute a domestic supply chain for the advanced chips needed for satellite infrastructure, AI systems, or next-generation communications hardware. India’s domestic semiconductor market was approximately $45-50 billion in 2024-25, according to industry estimates cited by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Closing the gap between consumption and domestic production is a decade-long task requiring sustained capital commitment. India’s competition framework does not treat foreign satellite infrastructure concentration as a market power question. The Competition Commission of India has a clear mandate over domestic pricing and merger activity. It has no instrument to act when a foreign entity’s control over orbital infrastructure creates de facto monopoly conditions for remote connectivity within India. That regulatory gap needs explicit legislative attention before dependence deepens further. Market Signals SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion valuation is not a data point about one company. It is a market signal about what global capital considers most valuable in 2026: not oil fields or shipping lanes, but control over the systems through which economies communicate, compute, and transact. India entered the hydrocarbon era as a net importer and spent decades building the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and domestic refining capacity to reduce that dependence. The programme continues to expand today, a reminder that infrastructure sovereignty is an ongoing commitment. The response was slow and expensive. It was also the right call. The digital infrastructure era has well and truly arrived. India is already a net importer of the connectivity and computing systems that will define the next phase of its economic growth. The SpaceX IPO makes the scale of that dependence visible in a single number. And policymakers do not have decades to respond this time. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

How Demonetisation Hit the Red Corridor

While Dhurandhar 2 dramatises a fake-currency crackdown, the real 2016 shock may have struck far deeper — at the cash lifeline of India’s Maoist insurgency.

In the 2026 blockbuster Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge, director Aditya Dhar stages a sequence that has already become a cultural talking point. Using actual footage of the 2016 demonetisation announcement, the film depicts a Rs 60,000 crore fake-currency racket aimed at destabilising Indian elections, collapsing in a single night. But while Dhurandhar 2 keeps its focus on counterfeit syndicates and urban kingpins, the real-world “strategic masterstroke” may have hit a far more dangerous target: the financial heart of Naxalism.


Beyond Pashupati to Tirupati

For decades, the “Red Corridor” was a chilling reality — a belt of insurgent influence stretching, in popular shorthand, from Pashupati in Nepal to Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. It functioned like a shadow state, openly challenging the authority of the Indian Constitution. But after 2016, the corridor did not merely crack; it began to recede. Government data for 2025–26 points to what officials describe as an “irreversible decline”, with the number of most-affected districts falling from 36 in 2014 to just two by March 2026. This retreat was driven by several factors, but it was undeniably accelerated by a sudden and devastating cash crunch.


Turning Paper into Trash

Naxalism was never just an ideology; it was also a cash-dependent insurgency. Intelligence assessments suggest that the CPI (Maoist) collected hundreds of crores annually through so-called “revolutionary taxes” levied on mining contractors, tendu leaf traders and infrastructure projects. Much of this money was reportedly held in physical cash, largely in ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes. That liquidity enabled cash-based procurement of arms, explosives and IED components, funded monthly stipends for full-time cadres and their families, and sustained an extensive network of urban informants.


Then came the rupture. Overnight, large parts of that underground cash economy were either frozen, exposed or rendered unusable. The most immediate blow was the disruption of the insurgents’ procurement cycle. Unable to finance arms, ammunition or logistics as easily as before, Maoist units were increasingly pushed into a defensive posture. By 2024–25, this financial squeeze appears to have contributed to a sharp rise in surrenders. More than 1,600 cadres laid down their arms in 2025 alone – a stark sign that an insurgency unable to feed its fighters or maintain its supply lines is already in decline.


The clearest confirmation came from within. Mallojula Venugopal Rao, better known as Bhupati – a senior CPI (Maoist) leader, Politburo member and brother of the late Kishenji – surrendered in Gadchiroli in October 2025. In interviews aired the following year, he acknowledged that Maoist rhetoric had diverged sharply from ground reality and identified demonetisation as a major financial blow. He said large amounts of cash could not be exchanged. According to Bhupati, his division alone had lost an estimated Rs 20–30 crore, gutting reserves that had long financed Maoist operations.


The ultimate legacy of demonetisation in the Red Corridor may have been not just financial ruin but psychological collapse. Once the money dried up, trust between the commanders and the cadre began to fracture. Bhupati’s surrender, along with 60 of his associates, symbolised that deeper implosion: the “Red Dream” became far harder to sustain when the cash stopped flowing.


Dhurandhar 2 may dramatise the end of fake currency, but the real story is larger. In the real world, the 2016 move appears to have dealt a blow far beyond counterfeit networks, forcing hardened insurgents to confront the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and mainstream reality. By April 2026, as the government pushes its “Naxal Mukt Bharat” narrative, one conclusion stands out: this was a conflict shaped not only by bullets but also by the sudden destruction of underground wealth.


(The writer is a brand strategist and a political commentator. Views personal.)

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