India, Oct. 31 -- If you think Donald Trump's tariff policies won't reach your phone, think again. The man who just imposed new levies on everything from electric cars to software could, with a single stroke of a pen, decide that WhatsApp messages from India count as "digital imports". If that happened, India's business communications could grind to a halt overnight. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, would comply immediately. Whether driven by regulation or diplomacy, the company would follow Washington's lead. Every Indian entrepreneur, trader, doctor, and government worker who relies on the app to coordinate would wake up locked out of their most essential tool. Deliveries would stall, vendors would disconnect, and customer service would freeze. The chaos would be instant and complete. That is how dangerously dependent India has become on a single American corporation for its daily flow of information. WhatsApp has quietly become the backbone of Indian commerce. Millions of small businesses run on it. Hospitals, schools, and government offices use it for coordination. A disruption would ripple through every sector of the economy. People talk about China's control of rare earths as a global risk. But Meta's control of India's digital lifeline poses a deeper strategic threat. China's monopoly can slow a supply chain; Meta's can mute a nation's voice. When a foreign company holds the keys to your country's communication, sovereignty becomes a slogan. The US understands this better than anyone. It has banned Huawei and ZTE from its telecom networks, arguing that whoever controls communications controls power. India, meanwhile, has handed its entire messaging backbone to a private American company with a long record of surveillance, manipulation, and data misuse. Meta doesn't even pretend to be neutral. It rewrote WhatsApp's privacy policy to coerce users into sharing data with Facebook, tolerated misinformation because it drove engagement, and built its fortune by monetising attention. If Washington ever decided to weaponise its tech giants - as it already has with semiconductors and cloud computing - Meta would comply without hesitation. Its loyalty lies with shareholders and US regulators, not with India's economy. Every WhatsApp user in India is, therefore, vulnerable to the politics of another country. Many Indians find comfort in WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption. That comfort is misplaced. Encryption hides the message, not the metadata - who you talk to, when, how often, and for how long. That metadata is gold for surveillance and advertising. Meta can map India's commercial and social networks in extraordinary detail. It knows the country's pulse better than many ministries. I have long warned about the dangers of WhatsApp and Meta's corrosive business practices. The company built its empire on the systematic erosion of privacy, the monetisation of outrage, and the manipulation of public discourse. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the spread of hate campaigns in India, Facebook's actions have repeatedly shown that profit outweighs principle. In 2018, I called for Facebook to be forced to shut down WhatsApp until it could guarantee user safety. The warnings were ignored. Since then, the dependence has only deepened. India has treated this dependency as a matter of convenience, not strategy. But communication infrastructure is as critical as energy or defence. When a foreign power can, at any moment, compel a private company to alter, slow, or charge for your communications, you have already ceded control of your digital future. There is another way - and it works. At Vionix Biosciences, my India team recently abandoned WhatsApp and switched to Arattai, the India-built messaging app from Zoho. The transition was effortless and the results immediate. Arattai is faster, cleaner, and designed for real collaboration. It syncs seamlessly across phones, desktops, tablets, and even TVs. It has a "Pocket" for saving notes and files, and a "Mentions" tab that gathers every time you're tagged in chats. Meetings are integrated directly within the app, so teams can move from text to video with one tap. Most importantly, Arattai has no ads, no trackers, and no third-party data sharing. All data stays within India, under Indian privacy laws. This is especially important for us because we are developing medical-diagnostics hardware and software, and will have large volumes of sensitive data that we need to protect. We host our AI tools and data on Krutrim - the sovereign AI cloud built by Ola - to ensure that our models and data remain on Indian infrastructure. The last thing we want is to jeopardise Indian sovereignty. I also use Arattai daily with my head of marketing, Alex Salkever, in Silicon Valley. Despite the distance to India, the calls are crisp, file transfers are instant, and there's a sense of control that American tech giants can't provide. Communication feels private again - like it should. Dependence on a foreign platform for national communication is complacency. The East India Company began as traders, secured monopolies through charters, won Plassey in 1757 (Indians betraying Indians), then annexed provinces via debt, divide-and-rule, and private armies - conquering all India by 1857 in a century-long creep. Today, Meta mirrors this: it entered as "free" convenience, locked users via network effects, and now holds the switch. One tweet from Washington could bring India to its knees in minutes. A country that values independence cannot let another Company control its voice....