Zoho, Arattai, Ulaa and Questions of Sovereignty in Swadeshi-ware

Zoho e-mail, Arattai chat messenger and Ulaa browser have been gaining an increased subscriber base with decisive marketing of the products not merely by the company, but also cabinet ministers in India. This marks a new marketing trend of an old policy of promoting domestic software firms by the Indian state with Swadeshi software, Swadeshi-ware. This trend is gaining nationalist support in the context of ongoing trade disputes with the United States.

India is a major market for global Big-Tech firms, with access to a potential user base of one billion. The market size in India makes it favourable for Big Tech to invest in India and has been the strategy for firms like Facebook since 2014. This also has led to a wave of demands for protection for Indian software from several Indian software communities, largely championed by iSPIRT (Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable) which championed the Aadhaar ecosystem for Indian firms.

These protectionist demands resulted in arbitrary access to Open APIs linked to India’s digital public infrastructures (DPIs). Facebook (now Meta)'s Whatsapp was not allowed to access UPI payment APIs for a long time, while UPI continued to be promoted as an Open innovation, with its standards or protocols never being made open. India’s digital infrastructures access and governance are often arbitrary in nature and are constantly shifting with geo-politics, such as the ban of Chinese apps and websites.

With the current geo-political tensions with the United States after its trade sanctions on Indian-origin goods and changes to H1-B policies, there has been increased demand from various protectionist associations for maintaining India’s digital sovereignty. There are calls to launch a digital swaraj mission to shift from US-led organisations, at least within the government.

The shift of email services from the government-owned National Informatics Centre to the privately owned Zoho e-mail is result of these changes in global dynamics and the Indian state’s interest in promoting domestic companies. As is being disclosed now, this process of shifting to Zoho e-mail has been under works for almost a year and has only been made public now. The reason to shift to Zoho e-mail was being explained as a move to counter government employees from using other open softwares, which may be on the cloud.

The Zoho e-mail is not the only service to receive state patronage, with its Ulaa browser winning the Indian web browser challenge by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeITY). The need for a domestic browser stems from the fact that several Indian websites are marked unsafe by major web browsers because of how NIC’s root certificate was misused to spoof domains of Google and Yahoo in 2014. The Ulaa browser is forced to trust the NIC’s root certificate, leading towards mistrust with the browser itself. This mistrust is not specific towards Zoho Ulaa, but towards all browsers that may have been developed as part of the Indian web browser challenge.

The mistrust of Zoho’s products also extends towards Arattai, which is being positioned as an alternative to Whatsapp. Arattai’s positioning as an alternative to Whatsapp is also being questioned especially when it comes to privacy and encryption. Adding to these complications is Zoho founder Sridar Vembu’s political positioning of how any software firm within India needs to adhere to Indian laws. This demand to enforce Indian laws would mean identification of every message sender under the IT Rules 2021.

Vembu is successfully carrying out the job of replacing Whatsapp, which his colleague V. Kamakoti of IIT Madras was unable to do, with the litigation around breaking WhatsApp encryption to identify senders of WhatsApp messages. Vembu and Kamakoti have both been part of India’s National Security Advisory Board, which shows their views align with India’s current security state.

India’s push towards swadeshiware is not limited to Zoho, with the Minister for Electronics and Information Technology also promoting several other domestic alternatives like Mappls by Mapmyindia as an alternative to Google Maps. Map My India has shown interest to partner with the Ministry of Road Transport and Ministry of Railways towards a Swadeshi Movement of indigenous technology.

Whom does data sovereignty and swadeshi-ware benefit?

The push for the Swadeshi Movement is not new in the Indian context and it has a large appeal to different sections of the population. With the rise of new forms of digital nationalism, which is demanding sovereignty of personal data, many questions arise about its goals.

Data sovereignty or sovereignty in general is often about control, in this case, control over a nation’s collective data and to be independent from the gatekeepers of the Global North, particularly the United States. In this form of national control, the control is shared with intermediaries that are close to the nation state, as feudal lords have shared the sovereign’s powers to extract rent from land.

This form of data sovereignty should not be conflated with the freedoms of the citizens of India. National control of data or having data sovereignty is not equal to personal sovereignty or rather freedoms for individuals. In the software world, freedoms have always been prioritised with distrust towards the state, leading to innovations in cryptography, encryption and privacy.

The rise of swadeshi-ware can be beneficial to companies that sell their products and use nationalism as a mask for marketing. But they can be detrimental to the public, with no clear respect towards the right to privacy in India. The priority towards promoting swadeshi-ware is not seen anywhere in enforcing India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA).

Through the new movement for swadeshi-ware, we might get independence with self-reliance but may not get dignity of life as one has been guaranteed under Article 21 of Constitution of India. This push for dignity in India, is not limited to privacy, and privacy itself cannot be achieved without participation from different communities of people in India. Merely being a nationalist doesn’t guarantee you privacy or dignity. We must re-examine the goals of the swadeshi-ware movement and continue to hold it accountable.

Vembu has relations with the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an economic wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Vembu thus shares the interests of a businessman, the interests of a nation state with his close affiliations with national security establishment and also the interests of a political party with religious politics.

Vembu represents our times much better than any other individual, with interests of capitalism, nationalism and religion all aligning towards control of society. David J. Stanley calls this Iron Triangle of Corporations, Religions and Government in his book The Cybernetic Indian: A Case for Secular Morality.

Srinivas Kodali is an independent researcher and hacktivist based in Cyberabad.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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