On the inaugural day of the India AI Summit last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of India’s human-centred framework for artificial intelligence (AI) called ‘MANAV’ – moral and ethical systems, accountable governance, national sovereignty, accessible and inclusion, valid and legitimate. In this explanation of national sovereignty, he calls on “Jiska data, uska adhikar (Your data, your right)”.This is an enormous statement to make for the prime minister. The link of sovereignty to individual choice and rights is a useful direction for the discourse, especially at a time when sovereignty is being commodified by the private sector, offered as a service, and being weaponised by governments. The segue to the rights of people is important, and refreshing.But what does this mean beyond rhetoric? If sovereignty is truly adhikar, then what social, political and economic arrangements are required to give it substance?Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.In the discussions and declarations of the India AI Impact Summit, much of the discourse around “democratising AI” was tethered to the notion of access to models, and the question who can use them, in what languages and the width of deployment. Multilingual datasets and evaluation benchmarks are being built, but largely to improve model performance. There is a push to diffusion, to ensure that use-case led AI Innovation reaches everyone. Inclusion as a call to action for social protection and entitlements has been repurposed to mean inclusion on platforms. But this type of inclusion to use does not redistribute power or value.The geopolitical layer further complicates this claim to sovereignty. At the Summit, the invocation of sovereignty fell flat as multiple agreements were signed for investments in compute partnerships, building of data centres and data-sharing that further impacts India’s ability to negotiate on sovereignty. In the name of expanding inclusion and innovation, India has deepened its dependence on American technology companies that are closely intertwined with US industrial policy. Agreements such as Pax Silica are dressed as collaboration but further formalise skewed asymmetries and extractions, causing a wedge between the countries of the Global South which might have been a site for solidarity. There is also a lack of cognition that value in the AI supply chain is accrued at the infrastructure layer, it is not afforded to the workers labelling the data, nor is it in evaluations for model improvement.In this push for scale and deployment, sovereignty becomes precarious — not only for citizens, but even for the state. If access depends on external infrastructure, if bargaining power is shaped by extractive bargains, and if inclusion is defined purely as onboarding users into systems built elsewhere, then the “N” in MANAV stands on uncertain ground. National sovereignty cannot rest on expanded usage alone; it requires leverage, ownership, and the capacity to negotiate value in a deeply asymmetrical technological order.If jiska data, uska adhikar is to be meaningful, it must go beyond enabling citizens to consume AI systems. It must ask whether individuals and communities have bargaining power in the data economy. Who determines the value of data? Who negotiates its extraction? Who benefits from downstream innovation? And who bears the cost of error, bias or exclusion?Going forward, we must stop speaking of “users” and start speaking of “citizens” – or rights holders. A user merely accepts terms of service; a rights holder has entitlements and the standing to negotiate them. The notion of rights holders also allows for governance of bottom-up structures which people have established such as data cooperatives that allow individuals to negotiate power, rather than make incremental changes to their experience online. Multilingual datasets are not technical artefacts alone; they are repositories of community knowledge. If they are used to build profitable systems, then communities are not just beneficiaries of access – they are co-creators of value. Efforts such as Masakhane are contemplating licenses, Mozilla’s data collective allows for terms to be declared for data use. These frictions to the vacuuming up of data are necessary.Second, governance in the pursuit of rights must be understood more expansively. In forums such as the AI Summit, discussions of platform safety have been largely framed as questions of AI governance. However, this has often narrowed the conversation to technical risk mitigation and compliance mechanisms, while sidelining deeper structural concerns such as the concentration of infrastructure and compute, control over data, market consolidation, and the politics of talent acquisition. These issues are not peripheral; they shape who holds power in the AI ecosystem and therefore who can meaningfully exercise rights within it.A more robust conception of governance must move beyond state-centric oversight and corporate self-regulation. It should incorporate participatory and community-driven mechanisms such as independent evaluations, public-interest audits, collective scrutiny, and even forms of organised resistance to harmful or extractive models. Research shows that it becomes especially crucial where state capacity or political will to regulate is limited. Governance is not merely about compliance, it is about contestation, accountability, and redistribution of power. This new understanding opens space for new forms of sovereignty defined by the communities that build, use, and are affected by AI systems. Rather than being confined to legal definitions imposed by states or operational frameworks designed by corporations, sovereignty can emerge from situated practices of collective agency.Wittingly or unwittingly, the prime minister’s “Your data, your right” call opens the door for resolving these tensions. Perhaps the intention was only to land a catchy phrase. But it creates an entry point for rethinking sovereignty, even if it is in contestation with the state.Astha Kapoor is co-founder of Aapti Institute, a Bengaluru-based research firm examining the interface between technology and society.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.