Arghya Sengupta and Lalitesh Katragadda

As Indian soldiers face the Chinese army in Ladakh, their courage in defending our borders makes our hearts both heavy and proud. However as citizens, our actions belie our feelings. India’s trade deficit with China is $48.5 billion, on the back of China’s near-complete domination of India’s consumer electronics market. The resulting economic upside is significant enough to fund China’s entire military expenditure on the Indian border. How do we face our soldiers and tell them that we are bankrolling the very peril that they are bravely pushing back against?

In this context, the decision by the Indian government to ban 59 Chinese apps including TikTok and WeChat is a significant statement of intent. Section 69A of the Information Technology Act allows the government to block access to any content on the internet if protection of Indian sovereignty requires such blocking.

While any direct connections between companies which own the blocked apps and the Chinese government are difficult to detect, by virtue of China’s national intelligence law every technology company in the country is under a legal obligation to “assist and cooperate with state intelligence”. Further, according to China’s cybersecurity law, all companies “must accept supervision from the government”. When that government wages war on India’s borders, a strong case exists to follow due procedure and block these applications.

Some might say that TikTok feeding videos of Indians gyrating to Bollywood music to the Chinese government is hardly an affront to our sovereignty. That would be missing the point. As a company, TikTok’s owner Bytedance has a history of kowtowing to the deep state in Beijing. Specifically, it has removed content at will, particularly messages about Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence, according to guidelines leaked to the Guardian newspaper in 2019. In this way, it exercises formidable power in shaping views of individuals.

Its privacy policy, last updated in February 2020, allows the company to take large amounts of data of Indians including metadata pertaining to location, mobile carrier, browsing history and share it with law enforcement, including in China. This is war by other means.

In this cyber dark war, unlike the Galwan incursion, India’s sovereignty is questioned on a daily basis. To chat, we use WhatsApp, an American app; to make video calls we use Zoom, an American company owned by a Chinese-origin American; even to block the 59 Chinese apps, the Indian government was reliant on Google and Apple to take these apps off the Play Store and AppStore respectively. Had there not been the tacit support of the US government in this action, scarcely would the ban have been so effective so quickly.

It is imperative to recognise that cyberspace is like Galwan valley at scale. To recover lost digital territory, putting shadowy foreign apps under strict scrutiny is only an opening salvo. To meaningfully assert our sovereignty, there needs to be constructive focus on select areas which launch India to global technology leadership. India must urgently start three missions to embark on its journey for self-reliance – in solar and battery energy, consumer electronics and AI. Indigenisation of these sectors with world-beating quality and price will be the only way to reduce our trade deficit with China and match its military might.

Take the example of solar and battery, which is now sufficiently low-cost to match oil and coal. Our market size makes it possible for India to be best-in-world – first by licensing, buying leading tech, which industrial houses will then use to add multiple gigawatts/ year of capacity. Large indigenous R&D will follow, catapulting India to an energy exporter. This blueprint of transforming expenditure into capacity, capacity into R&D and R&D into global leadership can be repeated in any area India wants to establish Atmanirbharta. It starts with energy self-reliance.

Again, the heart of consumer electronics, be it smartphones or televisions, is the central processor, often called SoC (system on a chip). India has some of the finest SoC designers in the world. An Atmanirbhar Grand Challenge to create best in class SoCs for Indian smartphones with unique innovations is urgently needed. It will, within 2 years, yield 2-3 winners who can then be married to Indian electronics companies to build global quality Indian smartphones for markets in India and abroad.

The other area is AI. One of the inventors of AI, Turing award winner Raj Reddy, always meant AI to bring parity to all 7 billion of us. This will be India’s contribution to technology – AI that serves India’s civilisational ethos of inclusion. Nowhere is this need more urgent than in medicine.

Indian innovators are already making Biobots to automate retinal scanning, mammography and ECG interpretation, some of which have matched certified professional competence. Governments need to put in place the right laws to rapidly certify and ensure public hospitals adopt them. If data generated from these processes remains in India and is made available only to Indian innovators, this has potential to solve the large medical problems of the Global South.

Ultimately, in technology as in the economy, we need to learn from our soldiers on the front. We need to steel ourselves for a few years of hardship with knowledge and belief that we will overcome. If we don’t, our dream of a tech sovereign India will become like a TikTok video – short-lived and illusory. If we do, perhaps our foes may never dare to draw battle lines inside our physical territory.

Arghya Sengupta is Research Director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy; Lalitesh Katragadda is Founder, Indihood. Views are personal

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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