How India keeps its Seat at Europe’s Space Buffet

Europe says it wants sovereignty in space. Not sovereignty as a metaphor, not sovereignty as a vibe, but actual operational control over orbital infrastructure. It created IRIS² to ensure that no foreign government or billionaire could yank a constellation offline in the middle of a crisis. That’s the official line.

The problem is that sovereignty only works if the contractors helping build it aren’t beholden to outside interests. And that part didn’t get sorted.

Enter Bharti.

Bharti Space, part of the Indian Bharti Group, has just increased its capital injection into Eutelsat. Not symbolically. Not subtly. €150 million. That puts Bharti at just under 18 percent ownership of Eutelsat, which is very much NOT a minor position. Eutelsat, in case anyone forgot, is not only a commercial satellite operator but also one of the core contractors delivering IRIS².

So while Brussels is out front describing IRIS² as the spine of Europe’s strategic autonomy, the company bolting on several vertebrae is now nearly one-fifth owned by an Indian conglomerate. This doesn’t register in the press releases. It doesn’t appear in the celebratory panel sessions. But it’s real.

Bharti doesn’t need to control Eutelsat to influence it. It doesn’t need a golden share or a red phone to the CEO. It only needs voting rights, board presence, and visibility into what Eutelsat is building and who it’s building it for. With almost 18 percent equity, that’s precisely what it has.

One could argue this is harmless. After all, India is not adversarial. It’s a fellow democracy. It’s not blocking trade routes or jamming GPS signals. That’s true, but irrelevant. Sovereignty, especially in space infrastructure, is not about who’s likely to do something. It’s about who could. Bharti now sits in a position where it could. That’s the whole point of sovereign architecture. You don’t build it to protect against the countries that already scare you. You build it so nobody, friendly or not, has a lever to pull.

France is the largest shareholder in Eutelsat. That fits the narrative. The UK holds around 11 percent and keeps a golden share over the OneWeb side of things. That’s a slightly different flavour of control, born from the post-bankruptcy rescue. Bharti’s capital, on the other hand, is straightforward equity. There is no strategic lock, no national security ringfence, no formal firewall between Bharti’s commercial interests and Eutelsat’s operational roadmap.

The counterargument goes like this: IRIS² is run by European institutions, so even if the contractors have mixed ownership, control remains within the EU. That’s half true. The satellites will be operated under European supervision. The mission design, security protocols, and access governance sit with the European Commission, ESA, and EUSPA. But the infrastructure enabling it, ground stations, orbital services, payload integration, traffic management, fleet scheduling, all run through companies like Eutelsat.

If Eutelsat has shareholders with cross-border interests, then there are vectors of influence. Not control. Influence. Influence doesn’t need a voting majority. It needs proximity to decision-making. And Bharti now has that.

Bharti’s goal is not to sabotage Europe’s communications architecture. Its goal is to expand its position in the global connectivity market, especially in India and across the Asia-Pacific corridor. It wants priority markets, favourable coverage, and a voice in how orbital capacity is allocated. That’s normal. That’s what a competent strategic investor does.

But that’s not what a sovereign contractor should allow if the end customer is building a constellation to break dependency on foreign actors.

This contradiction now sits at the heart of IRIS². On paper, it is the most ambitious project the European Union has attempted in satellite communications. It promises resilience, dual-use capability, independent routing, and a shield against third-party interference. That’s the brochure.

In practice, it is increasingly relying on a company with non-European ownership to deliver key subsystems. That company now has nearly a fifth of its voting power in the hands of a foreign telecom group with entirely different priorities.

This would be less awkward if the EU had placed clearer restrictions on capital structure during the contractor selection phase. It didn’t. Now it must pretend that Eutelsat’s shareholder mix is just an internal matter. It must maintain that Bharti’s investment is clean money, no different than any other. It must keep IRIS² on schedule, on budget, and under control, while pretending that none of the private actors building it have any ability to steer it from the inside.

The story is starting to crack.

The bigger the project, the more it exposes the structural tension between European ambitions and European constraints. IRIS² wants to be sovereign. But it is being built inside a network of dependencies. Some of them flagged, others quietly tolerated.

In theory, this is manageable. In practice, it turns the word sovereignty into something more aspirational than real.

Not because Bharti will interfere, but because it could.
Not because Eutelsat will bend, but because it might.
That’s the risk.

And sovereignty, by its own definition, isn’t supposed to include risk.