Well doing it decades later than others did help with that.
And how does it matter why they succeeded when the question is "are they capable of doing a Starlink?"?
1. The answer is 3.: USA, USSR, and the European Space Agency
Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)
Why? According to Wikipedia they spend like $1.4b annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO That's like an extra $10 for each of these citizens living in "extreme poverty".
And what's the cutoff? Like 10% of the US population is under the poverty line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States. Is NASA "obscene" too? Granted that's not the same as "extreme poverty" but it's still a bad look in the richest country in the world, right?
> unless it provides significant economic value
Investments in science and technology generally do. Rich countries are advanced in science and technology.
Your argument is all over the place. This thread is about if India could tackle LEO comsats, but perhaps you're seeing it through a lens of prestige/success.
> Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene
You'll love Gil Scott-Heron's classic that wrestled the same ideas in the 1960s USA, titled Whitey on the Moon