I woke up to Elon Musk calling Mukesh Ambani Prime Minister Ambani on X, and I laughed before my tea went cold because I have seen this exact blame loop play out with every foreign tech launch in Delhi.

I have never filed a DOT application in my life, so correct me where I get the paperwork wrong, and here is the paper trail as I pieced it together from the last five days. On October 8 Musk wrote that Starlink is licensed in over 165 countries and has spent five years complying with every single law in India and asked why there is still no commercial license and whether Ambani is the real boss of India. On October 9 he followed up with the Dear Prime Minister Ambani post about monopoly and whether Starlink would be allowed to compete for the villages with no internet. Over the weekend he shared old reports tying Reliance-linked money to BJP funds and accused Ambani supporters of arguing both sides at once, that Starlink cannot beat Jio prices and that it must be kept out anyway, and he promised affordable India pricing days before Jio Platforms chases a $106 billion IPO. On the other side communications minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said the authorisation framework is fair and non-discriminatory and that India does not permit monopolies in any sector.

My prophecy is boring which is why I trust it, because the file explains more of this mess than any phone call from Antilia does. Starlink says it already built 20 gateway sites with hundreds of antennas for India and ring-fenced Indian data inside India after years of MOUs with Airtel and Jio, and it still waits on security clearance with no clock and on spectrum pricing which still needs cabinet sign-off. Jio itself proposed around 1,600 low-orbit satellites with 23 ground stations and its Jio-SES combine still waits for the same spectrum allocation, and Bharti-backed Eutelsat OneWeb waits in the same queue, and all three waiting together tells me this is a jammed pipe rather than one man standing on it.

Airwaves man, airwaves, which is what keeps me up about this. The government has almost nothing to build for this switch-on, since it only has to say who can use which slice and at what price and under what interception window, and five years after Starlink started knocking we still get the same line that the licensing process is still being worked upon. A clearance with no deadline stays shut forever, and that is exactly where Starlink sits along with everyone else.

I also hear the cronyism charge differently because Musk speaks from American experience where he donated big and helped get Donald Trump elected and then collected contracts across agencies, and he assumes Delhi runs on the same invoice. Delhi runs on something duller which is the babu who loses the file and finds it and sends it for inter-ministerial comments and retires, and we have no DOGE here and the inefficiency I see stacks procedure on procedure.

If Ambani lifted his finger tomorrow the gateways would still need the same stamp, and the kids with no internet Musk keeps invoking would still wait for the same meeting. Tell me where my file theory breaks, I am @troysk704 and I will update this post with whatever stamp I missed.