Between Washington and Beijing, Can India Script Its TikTok Future?

For half a decade the TikTok question in India has been a simple binary for policymakers: ban or allow. The 2020 prohibition — one of 59 apps blocked amid acute border tensions with China — was framed as a defence of sovereignty and data security.

That calculus now collides with a more complicated landscape. The US is experimenting with carve-outs and corporate reshuffles to keep TikTok alive on American terms. A global race has emerged for control over attention economies and creative labour. Within India, the debate rages over whether the nation needs another global dopamine machine at all. A choice about TikTok’s return is not merely commercial or technical. It will shape India’s digital sovereignty, youth welfare, strategic posture, and industrial policy.

The American template offers a novel, if uneasy, experiment. Over the past year, Washington has explored an arrangement whereby a consortium of domestic investors oversees algorithmic retraining, US data storage, and board-level supervision, while the Chinese parent retains a minority stake. It is pragmatic in keeping a popular service alive, yet contentious because leasing, retraining, and legal ring-fencing may not eliminate latent influence.

India cannot and should not replicate this model. TheUS relies on private-sector actors as guarantors of national security. India’s context is different: a larger, younger user base; a weaker domestic content moderation industry; and a fraught relationship with China that played no small part in the 2020 ban. It’s a political economy in which platform harms — misinformation, social polarisation, predatory monetisation of attention — have different seams and sensitivities.

Even so, the US experiment offers instruments India must weigh: algorithmic custody, independent audits, data localisation under verified custodianship, binding content moderation standards, enforceable transparency in recommendation systems, and economic conditions that favour Indian creators and enterprises.

At the core lies a harder, more conceptual question: what truly constitutes digital sovereignty? Is it merely the storage of data within borders, or does it extend to algorithmic transparency, domestic oversight of content flows, and the ability to set rules without dependency on external guardians? India’s regulatory posture has oscillated between assertive bans and reactive compliance demands. A coherent doctrine demands clarity of principle, institutional capacity, and political consensus.

India’s predicament is that its digital sovereignty is not tested in the abstract but in the crucible of great-power rivalry. To lean towards Chinese platforms, even with safeguards, risks embedding vulnerabilities in the very architecture of communication. To lean exclusively towards American platforms risks ceding narrative and economic power to a different form of external dominance. The choice is not between two camps but whether India can build a “third way”: indigenous capability, strict reciprocity, and diversified alliances.

Digital sovereignty must not be trivialised as “whose app Indians dance on.” It is about who sets the standards for discourse, who harvests behavioural exhaust, who decides what Indian youth watch at midnight, and whose commercial models extract value from our cultural production. A flag over a server farm is insufficient. Sovereignty is proven only when platforms — American, Chinese or domestic — serve Indians first, not as an afterthought but as a governing principle.

Why should India’s vast digital marketplace simply fuel American incumbents such as Instagram while barring all contenders? Such asymmetry concedes that Indian scale exists merely to underwrite the dominance of US big tech, without reciprocity in either rules or returns. A carefully conditioned re-entry for TikTok, anchored in sovereign safeguards, would serve not as indulgence but as strategic counterweight. Such a move would also inject calibrated tension into the trilateral dynamics with the US and China, reminding Washington that India’s digital alignment is neither automatic nor cost-free, but contingent upon reciprocal concessions — in market access, in technology transfer, and in global visibility for Indian platforms.

Weighing Risks
There are sound arguments for allowing a return. First, banning a platform does not extinguish demand for short-form video or the economic opportunities it fertilises. Indian creators, small merchants and regional entrepreneurs have migrated to rival platforms; but TikTok’s global brand carries scale, global discovery and monetisation mechanics that can turbocharge livelihoods.

Second, leaving Western firms to monopolise the short-video ecosystem cedes an important bargaining chip in the global tech order. If the US can salvage TikTok for its interests, why should India’s market be closed to alternatives that are subject to robust safeguards and reciprocal rules? Third, controlled engagement with Chinese firms can be leveraged as a diplomatic tool — an instrument of calibrated engagement, not exclusion.

But the objections are powerful, principled and practical. India is not merely deciding between two apps; it is deciding whether to re-open a vast conduit that shapes attention, norms, and behaviour for hundreds of millions — many of them children and adolescents. Short-form platforms are optimised for engagement, not civic literacy. They can amplify sensationalism, erode attention spans, and drive harms that are difficult to adjudicate with retroactive takedowns. The assumption that the “market will self-correct” is a poor fit for an ecosystem where algorithmic optimisation is the core product. 

Moving from a categorical ban to a negotiated re-entry requires regulatory muscle and enforcement architecture India does not yet command at scale: trusted algorithmic auditors, real-time compliance monitoring, transparent third-party oversight, and capacity to compel data flows and forensic access. There is also the enduring geopolitical worry: even a heavily ring-fenced commercial arrangement may leave channels of influence open — economic, informational, political — that are hard to measure and easy to weaponise.

A Conditional Yes 
A responsible approach would avoid a crude “yes/no” and instead adopt “yes, provided”. There are three pillars to this proviso.

First, structural safeguards. Any re-entry must be predicated on demonstrable algorithmic separations: code escrow and independent code audits; verifiable data custody within Indian jurisdiction; and legally binding limits on cross-border access that can be audited by Indian authorities. Where foreign ownership persists, Indian nominees or an independent trustee model must be empowered on security, privacy and content matters.

Second, governance and safeguards. India should insist on enforceable standards: age verification, differential privacy for minors, limits on addictive engagement mechanics for minors, transparent ad disclosures, and on-platform literacy nudges. A statutory digital safety code must be married to binding financial penalties and criminal remedies for wilful non-compliance. Importantly, creators must have redress and data portability so that a single platform cannot hold an entire livelihood hostage.

Third, industrial and strategic leverage. If TikTok is permitted back, India must extract commitments to local R&D, employment thresholds in Indian cloud and content moderation, creator funds for regional languages, and technology transfer that seeds an indigenous short-video economy. Allowing only Western incumbents to benefit from Indian scale would be poor industrial strategy.

A permanent ban shields the present, but risks handing the future to external actors who write the rules. Re-entry is not risk-free, but risks can be converted into governable, enforceable obligations that serve national interest. This will require legal sophistication, institutional grit, and a public conversation about the social contract between platforms and citizens.

Yet a note of caution is essential. India’s regulatory and supervisory institutions remain nascent in their ability to monitor algorithmic flows, verify code integrity, and pre-empt covert Trojan horse pathways embedded in foreign digital systems. A hasty re-entry without strengthening oversight would be an open invitation to exploitation — not only of data, but of narratives, markets, and civic trust.

India must therefore resist the temptation to be dragged into a binary of Washington’s playbook or Beijing’s platforms. The wiser course is a “third way” — one that insists on reciprocity, protects citizens through robust regulation, extracts industrial advantage, and builds indigenous capabilities while engaging foreign firms on tightly defined terms. Such a path would not only answer the TikTok dilemma, but also set the foundation for India’s long-term digital statecraft: a sovereign architecture of technology that is open yet controlled, competitive yet secure, global yet distinctly Indian.