Principal scientific adviser to the government K Vijay Raghavan, who also heads a high-level committee on 5G, has opined that India should proceed with 5G trials with all vendors straightaway, but must drop Chinese companies from the list. The government must heed Raghavan. What should ring alarm bells is that Huawei, Chinese telecom giant which is a top 5G contender, has close ties to the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed all Chinese companies are supposed to have Party cells embedded in them. There is hardly much separation between Chinese private companies and the state – all of whom work together as China Inc under the Chinese state capitalist model.

What must be clearly understood by Indian policy makers is that 5G is not just an economic but also a strategic decision with large security ramifications. 5G will be the backbone of tomorrow’s digitally enabled industrial infrastructure, and it is also uniquely vulnerable to cyberwarfare due to which security safeguards must be built in. India has opposed the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the latter intrudes on its sovereignty. But China now plans to take BRI into the virtual dimension by building a ‘digital silk road’ of 5G enabled systems – built to Chinese standards – that will knit together BRI infrastructure.

Being part of such a virtual network could lay India open to cyberwarfare and intrude on its sovereignty far more drastically than any physical ‘silk road’ infrastructure. Consider a future Doklam standoff-like scenario where Beijing threatens to cripple India’s industrial infrastructure unless New Delhi meets all its demands. Or another one: Chinese intelligence services snoop on Indian institutions and individuals and pass the information on to Pakistan’s ISI. These entirely plausible scenarios are good enough reason to deny Chinese firms entry into 5G.