India’s government is making a high-profile push to turn the country’s Swadeshi, or self-sufficiency, tech dream into reality. In October, Home Minister Amit Shah announced that he was switching to Zoho Mail, an email service from the Chennai-based Zoho Corp. He joined Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and 1.2 million government employees on the platform.
The government has framed its renewed push for homespun technology as part of a broader campaign against a global digital order that is still overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. In the past, the government has assiduously promoted “indigenous” digital platforms such as Koo (as an alternative to Twitter, now X) and Sandes (as an alternative to WhatsApp) in the name of Atmanirbhar Bharat—a self-reliant India.
India’s government is making a high-profile push to turn the country’s Swadeshi, or self-sufficiency, tech dream into reality. In October, Home Minister Amit Shah announced that he was switching to Zoho Mail, an email service from the Chennai-based Zoho Corp. He joined Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and 1.2 million government employees on the platform.
The government has framed its renewed push for homespun technology as part of a broader campaign against a global digital order that is still overwhelmingly dominated by the United States. In the past, the government has assiduously promoted “indigenous” digital platforms such as Koo (as an alternative to Twitter, now X) and Sandes (as an alternative to WhatsApp) in the name of Atmanirbhar Bharat—a self-reliant India.
Digital decolonization is an admirable goal. But the state’s campaign contains a concerning paradox: The same mechanisms intended to empower a nation of citizens could just as easily extend the state’s reach into dangerous territory. The line between digital liberation and control is dangerously thin, especially in the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s majoritarian and Hindu-nationalist government.
In a country with a long history of anti-colonial struggle, the public has a deep appreciation for national self-sufficiency and strategic autonomy. As such, Indian citizens are predisposed to embrace the imperative of digital decoupling. Unfortunately, though, the government’s efforts have so far treated digital sovereignty less as a moral ideal for technological emancipation and more as a symbolic tool of nationalist politics.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claims to be rescuing the country from the unfavorable, asymmetric power structures of the Western-dominated digital order. “We will not allow you to work like East India Company,” then-Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Twitter in 2021. The BJP-led government first codified this stance in 2018, with the National Digital Communications Policy, which sought to ensure that “new technologies are accessible to all equitably and affordably.” The next year, the government unveiled a draft e-commerce policy that stated that citizens possess a sovereign right over their data.
But as commendable as these goals sounded, they failed to confront deeper questions about belonging in India—or offer a definite vision of an alternative society based on the dignified political lives of individuals within a digital space. Fundamentally, digital sovereignty requires a shared political context within which it can operate. The idea of “the people” lies at its heart, but in India, as well as elsewhere, how the people is conceived is a fraught question.
While anti-colonial struggles always imagines a new sovereign community, the current Indian government has failed to forge a sense of unity, a sense of collective being. This failure forms the core of India’s digital decolonization dilemma.
Since it rose to power in 2014, the BJP’s majoritarian Hindu nationalism has cracked open internal divisions, exemplified by heightened anti-Muslim sentiments and increased attacks on minorities and critics and questioning of those groups’ loyalties. This in turn has had a pervasive effect on the digital sphere, which has become increasingly entrenched in statecraft and governance. Political instrumentalization of social media is now a regular feature of Indian politics, with all major parties cultivating an online presence to shape public perception. However, no party comes close to the BJP in its capacity to dominate digital narratives and to recast ideas of identity, belonging, and state power. As a matter of fact, since India’s first “social media election” in 2014, the BJP has been at the forefront of digitally mediated politics. It has greatly expanded its digital apparatus, including an estimated 5 million WhatsApp groups to spread party information, and has consolidated its advantage in the digital landscape through successive victories in the 2019 and 2024 general elections.
More worryingly, this digital politicalization has coincided with the amplification of pro-government narratives, attacks on independent media, and the stymying of civil society opposition through dissent monitoring and algorithmic curation all while sidelining democratic standards.
Modi’s government has advanced various legal and regulatory efforts to increase its control over digital spaces. In the process, it has come into conflict with Big Tech companies such as X, Facebook, and WhatsApp after demanding these platforms share user data and messages upon request, even when it means circumventing end-to-end encryption. Credible reports further suggest that the government has used legal measures selectively and leveraged India’s position as one of the world’s largest tech markets to influence how platforms moderate political content.
Or consider the government’s evolved control over the national media through its close ties with India’s big business groups. Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, for instance, has a known affinity for the ruling party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India’s largest far-right Hindu organization, which uses militant forms of cultural nationalism to push for an ineluctably Hindu India.
Even the promise of data protection for individuals—a crucial democratic safeguard against the state’s coercive powers—has become illusory. For all its claims of empowering citizens by protecting individual privacy, the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act (and its subsequent administrative rules) falls far short of realizing this goal. According to the Internet Freedom Foundation, the act and its rules instead widen the scope for state agencies to collect personal data with “scant oversight, thereby entrenching state control.”
Consequently, an ominous cloud hangs over the government’s push for digital sovereignty, which threatens to become a new form of political control and exclusionary politics.
This troubling dynamic is not without precedent. In China, for instance, digital sovereignty is marked by state surveillance, sanctions, and censorship against political adversaries. State control is upheld through measures such as the Great Firewall, political censorship, and the imperative of the Cybersecurity Law to keep data localized in China.
Similarly, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invokes digital sovereignty as a pretext for expansive suppression of political dissent, dissemination of pro-government narratives, and strict regulation of Western social media platforms. Comparable practices are also evident in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin’s government frames digital sovereignty as an effort to protect the state from foreign influence via the internet. In reality, though, it heightens state control over information networks, facilitating a transition to digital isolationism like China.
In all these examples, the promotion of domestic technological alternatives, the coercive inducement of public self-censorship, and the steady expansion of the legal basis for state-imposed restrictions operate as recurring and mutually reinforcing strategies.
India appears to be moving in the same direction. Digital guidelines introduced in 2021 mandate traceability and expansive executive authority over online content takedown. The 2023 Telecommunications Act grants the state expansive interception and surveillance powers under the broad national security exceptions. And a proposed broadcasting regulations bill consolidates oversight in government-appointed bodies and relies on vague content-restriction categories. All these measures embody the same centralizing logic. Taken together, they show a state consolidating its powers under the guise of digital decolonization.
The struggle for digital self-determination remains vital. But India’s current Swadeshi movement has appropriated this worthy goal to consolidate control over the digital sphere. While the rhetoric of digital sovereignty celebrates empowerment, in reality it has further disenfranchised minorities and suppressed critics of the government.
As a result, Indian citizens have been denied their right to true digital decolonization. People who are genuinely opposed to techno-imperialism and wish to actively support their country’s pursuit of digital sovereignty now find themselves forced to support indigenous platforms that are vulnerable to political control. As has happened all too often in the global struggle for decolonization, nationalism and loyalty come at the cost of political freedom, and the language of strength, sovereignty, and integrity serve to stifle dissent and diversity.
