When Elon Musk met Narendra Modi in Washington DC in February, the SpaceX and Tesla chief presented India’s prime minister with a gift and introduced him to his family. Modi described the meeting as “very good”.
Modi was in the United States to see President Donald Trump. In Modi’s meeting with Musk, the two talked about collaborating in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), space exploration, innovation and sustainable development, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
But almost a month later, Musk’s social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government, alleging that New Delhi is unlawfully censoring content online.
The lawsuit comes as Musk edges closer to launching both Starlink and Tesla in India.
So why is X suing India just as Musk is trying to charm Modi?
Why is X suing the Indian government?
In a suit filed in the high court of the South Indian state of Karnataka on March 5, X has alleged that the government of India is using “an impermissible parallel mechanism” which blocks content online and also empowers government officials and ministries to remove illegal online content, circumventing the legal process for content regulation laid out in the country’s Information Technology Act.
Section 69A of the country’s IT Act, which was passed in October 2000, gives India’s IT ministry the right to remove online content deemed harmful to the country’s national security and “public decorum”, but it must follow a judiciary process under which the ministry requests permission to remove online content from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). MeitY examines the content and then decides whether to censor it.
Now, the Indian government has introduced a new mechanism to delete content – Section 79 (3)(b) of the IT Act, which has a separate blocking process.
Section 79 (3)(b) allows online content to be removed following a simple notification from a government official. Notices to remove content can be sent via the government’s “Sahyog” (which means cooperation in English) portal without any form of judicial review.
The Indian government requires social media platforms like X to sign up to the Sahyog portal, but the social media platform claims doing so will subject it to “arbitrary censorship”.
“The new legal censorship power they have created [through the Sahyog portal] does not have safeguards such as a requirement of a designated officer sending the censorship request to the central government. Now, it can be done by any government department by designating an officer which can send takedown requests, as was done by the country’s railway ministry earlier this year, when it ordered X to take down over 200 videos concerning a stampede which occurred in New Delhi in February,” Apar Gupta, a lawyer and co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told Al Jazeera.
“Through the parallel censorship system, the government has taken an illegal step. There is merit to the claim being made by X in this instance,” Gupta added.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member and former IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Indian News Agency Asian News International: “India is a country where the law applies to everybody. X is within its right to go to court.”
X’s case against the government was made public by Indian media reports on March 20 and the next hearing is at the Karnataka High Court on March 27.
Al Jazeera has contacted India’s IT ministry and the ruling BJP party for comment.
Is controversy over X’s chatbot driving this case?
It does not seem so. While officials at MeitY have told local media that it is talking to X about content generated by the social media platform’s in-built chatbot, Grok 3, the X lawsuit predates this.
In recent weeks Grok has caused a stir in India by generating content and responses to users’ questions which are considered “abusive and controversial” by the ruling BJP government.
When one X user “asked” Grok if Prime Minister Modi’s interview responses are scripted, the chatbot responded: “Modi’s interviews often seem scripted – his answers are polished, on-message and rarely stray from the narrative. He’s a PR machine, using social media and controlled settings to shape his image, as seen with his heavy multimedia strategy since 2014. Real impromptu moments? Almost nonexistent.”
Gupta said: “There has been a high level of self-censorship in India, as well as a rise in what is called digital authoritarianism, in which a lot of people don’t feel free to say what they want to say. Grok gives them the chance to pose questions critical of the union government, particularly the prime minister and the chatbot has been responding on the basis of a data stream, which includes Wikipedia articles and journalistic articles in a chatting and engaging manner.”
“But at its very root, people need to understand that Grok is mostly AI which has been trained on public resources and what it is stating can also reflect misinformation and may suffer from biases,” he added.
“There is no correlation between filing the case and the Grok responses generating a viral trend. The only relationship is that the same ministry of the government [MeitY] is involved,” he added.
What does this mean for X users in India?
Gupta said it is too early to tell what the impact of the outcome of the case will be for X users in the country.
“For users in India, there has always been friction between the government and large social media platforms. The reason behind this is that the government often does not follow the constitutional limits placed on them and requires censorship for political reasons. So any pushback by platforms ends up supporting the cause of free expression, which is very well needed in closed societies where a very high level of censorship is present,” he said.
“But in this case, X also has a historic problem of not being more transparent with how it decides and determines its content moderation practices, and globally, X has stopped reporting government demands for takedowns, which used to be submitted prior to Musk’s takeover. So X definitely is no model corporate actor in a way either,” he added.
Will the X lawsuit harm Musk’s prospects in India?
It is unlikely, say experts. Michael Kugelman, South Asia Institute director at The Wilson Center, a Washington, DC-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that Musk operates with “a lot of leverage” in India, thanks to his wealth and the investment capital he’s prepared to deploy in high-growth industries such as telecoms and renewables.
Musk has also been appointed by Trump to lead the US government’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has announced swingeing cuts to federal jobs and claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste and fraud in government spending.
“His proximity to Trump ramps this leverage up even more. So he has great leeway to do as he wishes without the risk of alienating New Delhi. He can dangle Starlink and Tesla while also acting on his principle of ‘free speech absolutism’ on social media,” he said. He has already reached agreements with telecom companies in India to provide Starlink services and is in talks with others. Plans to introduce a Tesla manufacturing base in the country are also under way.
Similarly, the impact of this suit on overall US-India ties will be small, he said. “Given all the different tracks of cooperation playing out in the relationship, and given all the goodwill that it enjoys, this X spat is a blip at best and a nuisance at worst. Not to mention, the massive Indian market is far too appealing to pull back from,” he added.
“So no matter how the legal process plays out, X will want to stick it out in India. That commitment to stay can also help fend off possible bilateral tensions.”
