Durov aimed at the wrong target. Reliance Communications, not Meta-backed Jio, runs the subsea cables he says were hijacked. The Indian government's Telegram ban stems from exam paper leaks.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov accused Reliance of lobbying for a ban on his app in India and of hijacking its network traffic abroad. The problem is he aimed at the wrong company.
Durov posted on X that "Indian telecom Reliance" is sabotaging Telegram access via BGP hijacking, and that this "may be part of a competitive war, as Reliance is partially owned by Meta, the company behind WhatsApp."
A senior telecom industry source told AlphaScala that Durov confused Reliance Communications with Reliance Industries Ltd. RCom operates subsea cables. RIL's digital arm Jio is the entity in which Meta holds a minority stake. These are separate groups. The source called the allegation "fake news" and said conflating the two "demonstrates either a lack of understanding of the sector or a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation."
India's government ordered Google and Apple to delist Telegram from their app stores through June 22 over paper-leak concerns tied to the NEET-UG medical entrance exam. A separate directive requires Telegram to disable its message-editing feature in India until June 30, after the platform was used to fabricate post-event evidence.
Durov's claim might muddy the real story. The ban and feature restriction are government actions, not commercial lobbying, and the target of his BGP-hijacking charge controls a different set of cables than the company Meta actually invested in. An email query to Telegram, RCom, Jio, Meta and WhatsApp did not draw immediate replies.
For META stock page, the episode carries no direct operational risk. Meta's stake is in Jio's digital retail arm, not RCom's undersea cables, and the Indian government's rationale for the Telegram action is examination security, not antitrust or competitive lobbying.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.