The Chilling Meeting Between Elon Musk and Narendra Modi
Reading Time: 4 minutesEach needs something from the other. No wonder they’re both smiling., Elon Musk met Narendra Modi. Here’s why it’s chilling.
It’s a big week for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His trip to the United States marks his first ‘official state visit‘ to the country—meaning, this time he’ll be the guest of honor at a formal state dinner with President Joe Biden, and he’ll address a joint meeting of Congress. The sojourn signals the U.S.’s firm commitment to its ally India, despite worries from dozens of sitting Congress members over the country’s horrific human rights abuses as well as its suppression of free speech and activism. Nevertheless, Modi has received a rapturous welcome stateside, kicking things off Wednesday with an International Day of Yoga session at the United Nations’ headquarters, where he was joined by New York City Mayor Eric Adams and actor Richard Gere, among others. He’s also taken the ‘opportunity to meet business leaders,’ as he ‘seek[s] to deepen India-USA ties in key sectors like trade, commerce, innovation, technology,’ Modi wrote in a Monday tweet. It turns out, one of those meetings occurred the very next day, with Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Say, you might be thinking, weren’t there some issues with Twitter and India recently? You’d be correct: Among the many problems Musk inherited with his November acquisition of Twitter, the platform’s strained relationship with the Indian government was a big one. Last summer, in the months leading up to Musk’s takeover, Twitter whistleblower Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko alleged in a legal filing that India’s government ‘forced Twitter to hire specific individual(s) who were government agents‘ without disclosing that fact. The Zatko revelations came on the heels of Twitter’s lawsuit against India, filed in July over the Modi administration’s nonstop flurries of requests to either obscure from sight or fully take down tweets and accounts belonging to users that opposed the Indian government’s messages around policy, protests, and religious expression. The affected accounts encompassed several journalists and politicians from opposition parties. Furthermore, Twitter spelled out in the suit, India elected to use brute force in the face of the social network’s initial defiance, dispatching police to raid Twitter India offices and otherwise threaten employees of the company in the country. These sordid tales of Twitter’s pre-Musk tangles with India gained renewed attention last week, when former CEO Jack Dorsey told the podcast Breaking Points about India’s censorship requests and threats to scuttle Twitter’s presence within the subcontinent altogether, including through office raids and employee arrests. Naturally, Modi’s ministers denied all of this. (By the way, has Musk, new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, or any international outlet commented recently on the still-ongoing lawsuit, which last year was touted worldwide as a watershed moment for free speech? No, no they have not.)
Has that checkered context influenced Elon Musk’s approach to India’s information policing? Not in the slightest. For one, Twitter’s general functionality under Musk has suffered in India, thanks to his mass layoffs of Indian staffers and reduction of Twitter server capacity—all part of his aggressive ‘cost-cutting’ at the website. For another, he’s allowed the reinstatement of Hindu nationalist accounts that had been formerly banned for disparaging and encouraging violence against Indian Muslims, who’ve faced steep persecution under the Modi regime. And, as has been well-documented, Twitter has not let up in ceding to India’s censorship requests, whether those concern links to documentaries critical of Modi, Sikh diaspora members worried about governmental crackdowns, and official accounts affiliated with countries that are considered to be India’s enemies. Last month, he notably acquiesced in similar fashion to Turkish censorship requests in the midst of a critical election.
It can be safely assumed that none of this came up during Musk’s conversation with Modi, which the former referred to as an ‘honor.’ After the New York meeting, Musk did comment on these issues when reporters asked him about India’s stranglehold over Twitter. ‘Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments,’ Musk stated, repeating a line he’s used as an excuse for government-demanded content takedowns again and again. ‘We will get shut down. So, the best we can do is hew close to the law in any given country, but it’s impossible for us to do more than that, or we’ll be blocked and our people will be arrested.’
Such superficial reasoning doesn’t even touch whether the laws in question—in this case, the punitive digital-information-control measures that India passed in 2021—are compatible with an information society that was once celebrated for allowing greater modes of popular expression, or how twisted it is to admit that the government you’re sucking up to will kick you out and arrest your employees should you disobey them. Sure, money’s tight at Twitter, and Musk does not want to lose the platform’s third-largest market. But there’s likely another reason for Musk’s accommodative stance toward the Modi government.
In another Tuesday post-meeting briefing, this one situated in front of multiple Indian flags, Musk told the press that Modi is ‘pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something we intend to do,’ alluding to plans to visit the country next year on behalf of Tesla and StarLink, the satellite internet service operated by Musk’s SpaceX. He mentioned that he and Modi have known each other a while—the PM visited Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory back in 2015—and that he’s unambiguously ‘a fan of Modi.’
The two weren’t always so chummy. A little over a year ago, Musk announced that longtime negotiations to set up a Tesla manufacturing plant in the South Indian state of Karnataka had stalled, because the national government would not allow Musk to elide import taxes on automobile products. Nevertheless, Musk has determined to push for a Tesla presence in India, and he met with government officials last month, reports Reuters, to seriously discuss establishing electric vehicle factories and battery plants. Perhaps the simplest read of the situation is the most likely: that the leader of one company that would like to do business with India might be willing to allow his other, far less lucrative company to let a few things slide for that government’s benefit. He’s certainly warped Twitter’s usual practices for less.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/musk-modi-meeting-twitter-tesla-india.html
Ref: slate
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