> "As India sets the new rules of the game, it is seeking inspiration from China. Although India does not want to go as far as China, which has cut off its internet from the global one, officials admire Beijing’s tight control over citizens’ data and how it has nurtured homegrown internet giants like Alibaba and Baidu by limiting foreign competition. At the same time, regulators do not want to push out the American internet services that hundreds of millions of Indians depend on."

This is the main point. The main reason the government wants data to be stored locally and is also looking at controlling companies is for surveillance. But unlike China, not all platforms have Indian created equivalents. Fortunately for the citizens of India, regardless of the state of surveillance in the U.S., the U.S. companies do fight a lot more against these controlling measures than any Indian born company ever would. Indian companies like Reliance Jio, which considers "data as the new oil" (the parent company, Reliance, was built on crude oil), and many others have had a thirst for more data for sometime now. [Incidentally, the logo of "Jio" is a mirror image of "Oil" in a certain font]

> “There is a strong feeling in many quarters that the reason that India has not been able to develop a Tencent or Baidu or Alibaba is because we have not been nuanced in our policies.”

This sounds kind of naïve. It's not because of data related policies that these haven't happened.

> "Officials were furious after the Cambridge Analytica scandal this year revealed that Facebook had shared private information on 87 million users, including 560,000 Indians, with a political consulting firm that had sought to influence Indian elections."

This is ironical, because the governments (both central and state governments) didn't even acknowledge issues or took responsibility or made a statement that data leaks from their own sites would be dealt with seriously. Their game is like this — "if we leak data, then it's not an issue, but if someone else is, then we will be outraged". It's just pseudo-nationalistic sentiment that the current central government has been fostering. A search for "Aadhaar data leaks" will show many such instances and the lack of a decent response from the governments.

> "They also warned that India has fewer legal protections than the United States against government searches and data requests, so private data stored in the country could more easily end up in the hands of the police."

This is very true. The central government has shown that it has very little interest in getting a good privacy law in place. The one recently released publicly has so many issues that concerned citizens have started https://saveourprivacy.in/ . Please share this site with every Indian citizen you know.

As an Indian citizen, my only hope is that foreign tech companies resist the crippling moves by the executive. The courts move very slowly, but they're the (mostly) dependable arm here.