Artificial Intelligence has a keen hold on the collective imaginations of policymakers in the Global South, including in India. As this set of technologies becomes increasingly influential, questions have been raised about the capabilities and paths towards appropriately developing, using, and governing AI systems. One approach, as put forward by Luca Belli, has been to examine AI development and governance from the perspective of sovereignty, and look at what levers and policies countries can adopt to secure their sovereign interests in AI development. This short response to Belli examines Indian AI policy and governance from the lens of Belli’s ‘Key Enablers of AI Sovereignty’. Further, it interrogates the potential and limitations of sovereignty-based discourses and frameworks, and examines how it might include questions of injustice, equity, and democratic participation. Luca Belli’s framework of the Key Enabler’s of AI Sovereignty provides a pragmatic and useful lens through which government institutions and policymakers can understand and respond to concerns about harnessing the capabilities of the unwieldy set of technologies that comprise today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape. In examining the Brazilian context, the framework also shows how longer trajectories of media and information governance—telecommunication policy, data protection law, security and adequate infrastructure—each contribute in their own ways to ensuring sovereignty, which, as per the terms of the paper, is understood as the ‘capacity of a given country to understand, develop and regulate AI systems’. In this short response, I examine what discourses around AI sovereignty have looked like in the Indian context, where current understandings of sovereignty fall short, and what policy considerations might guide AI development in the Global South more broadly.