'A lying capitalist': Elon Musk joins arm-in-arm with the 'left' in India as his companies fail to establish any presence in subcontinent

When Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition and the face of India's left, saw Elon Musk attacking the Indian government this week, he welcomed him in. 'Welcome to India, Elon,' Gandhi posted on X. 'Wait till you discover the other guy.' Musk replied: ‘Thank you, Rahul. This is indeed troubling.’

Pause on that exchange, because it should not exist.

Two Men Who Agree On Nothing

Consider who these two are.

Elon Musk is the most prominent capitalist on earth and an avowed enemy of the left. He poured money and his platform into the American right, personally led a drive to slash the size of the US government, and has spent years attacking the regulation, redistribution and 'woke' politics that the left champions.

Rahul Gandhi leads the Congress, the standard-bearer of India's left, a politics built on curbing big capital, checking billionaire power and expanding the state's role. His entire pitch is opposition to exactly the kind of unaccountable mega-wealth Musk embodies.

By every stated principle, these two should be adversaries. Musk is everything the Indian left claims to oppose. The Indian left is everything Musk claims to oppose.

Why They Fell Into Step Anyway

And yet, within hours, they were allies.

Not over any shared value — there is none — but over a shared enemy: the elected government of India. For Musk, the government is an obstacle to Starlink's licence. For the opposition, anything that embarrasses that government is useful. So the capitalist and the left clasped hands, each borrowing the other's grievance, neither believing a word of the other's politics.

This is Musk's hypocrisy in its purest form. The man who treats the left as a civilisational threat in America embraces it in India the instant it serves his business. His ideology, it turns out, is for sale at the price of a satellite licence.

The Left's Mirror

In fairness, the hypocrisy runs both ways, and it would be dishonest not to say so.

The Indian left exists, in its own telling, to resist crony capitalism and the outsized power of billionaires. Yet here it is cheering the world's richest man as he demands that a foreign corporation be fast-tracked past India's security agencies, and as he brands India's institutions an oligarchy. A movement that claims to stand against billionaire power is amplifying a billionaire's tantrum, because the billionaire happens to be attacking its domestic rival.

Both sides have abandoned their principles for the same reason: convenience.

This Is A Pattern, Not A One-Off

It has happened before. In 2024, when Musk mused that electronic voting machines should be scrapped, India's opposition seized on his words to question the integrity of Indian elections, with Rahul Gandhi calling the machines 'black boxes'.

The pattern is consistent: whenever Musk's platform or his business collides with the Indian state, his megaphone ends up amplifying whoever is attacking that state — and the opposition is only too glad to pick it up. An American billionaire's commercial grievance becomes a prop in a domestic political fight.

The Correct Path

Indians watching this should see it for what it is: not a principled alliance, but two self-interested actors with a common target. Musk wants his licence; the opposition wants the government weakened. India's institutions are the thing caught in between.

The honest response is to judge the Starlink question on its merits — a security clearance applied equally to Jio, Airtel and Starlink — and not to be swayed because a foreign capitalist and the domestic opposition have, for their own reasons, decided to sing the same song.

What To Watch

Whether the Musk-opposition alignment deepens or dissolves once Starlink's licence is resolved. Whether the Indian left reckons with cheering a billionaire it would otherwise condemn. And whether Musk's ideological about-face in India dents his pose as a man of fixed conviction.