Chinese Media is gloating over the fact that IAF, can field just 600 fighter aircraft against the 2,000 that China and Pakistan can together place against it.They are quite happy that the cancellation of the Rafale tender of 126-aircraft and its replacement by a contract for just 36 fighters leaves IAF short of 90 most deadly fighters. Also with the Indian government going slow on further procurements, this deficit is likely to deepen.
Defence Ministry of India it seems have ruled out early tendering for the announced purchase of 110 medium fighters, worth an estimated US$15 billion to US$18 billion. This means the Indian Air Force (IAF) must make do with just 31 squadrons of fighter aircraft – 11 short of its authorised 42 squadrons, which planners believe are essential for a “two-front war” against regional adversaries China and Pakistan, if they were to join forces.
By contrast, China and Pakistan are continuing to arm rapidly. Beijing is selling Islamabad its increasingly sophisticated fighter aircraft, warships and ground systems, building up Pakistan as its cat’s paw in South Asia. The capability gap between Indian and Chinese armed forces, already worrying for New Delhi planners, is growing inexorably. Even Pakistan, which once feared an existential threat from India, now talks confidently of halting the Indian military without having to trip the nuclear threshold.
The Rafale procurement is now before the Comptroller and the Auditor General, which will scrutinise the process for procedural correctness. The opposition, visualising this as a political opportunity, wants to bring the issue before a joint committee of parliament. Either way, the “Rafale scam” has become the latest phrase in India’s rich lexicon of defence procurement controversies. The BJP is not worried. However it is affecting our strategy for defence procurement. Though Congress is just not worried about the chinks being created in our national defence. This party is even aligning with Pakistan to hit out at BJP. It has gone down so low in its dealing that soon this party will become shameless.
Thanks to vocal but baseless opposition campaign that has charged the Govt with financial wrongdoing over the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter aircraft from French company Dassault, there is now soft-pedalling of the purchase of other weapons badly needed by the overstretched military. As testified before a parliamentary defence committee more than two-thirds of the army’s equipment was obsolete, while only eight per cent was state-of-the-art. The navy and air force were only slightly better off. Yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which faces general elections next year, is loath to risk the political controversy that it fears might stem from buying more weaponry abroad.
There is no movement on the Indian Navy’s global procurement of 57 fighters, or an aircraft carrier that is to be built in the country. The only bright spot is the US$6 billion purchase of the S-400 Triumf air defence missile system from Russia, which was earmarked to be signed during an India-Russia summit next month, is likely to be signed next month. Also in pipe line is the US$6 billion purchase of six conventional submarines and army equipment such as armoured vehicles and assault rifles.
Late last year, the Congress party, led by Gandhi family Rahul Gandhi, as per a pre planned strategy launched a multi-pronged attack on the Rafale contract. Its centrepiece was the charge that the government had compromised national security by replacing a near-complete 126-Rafale purchase with a deal for just 36 fighters. The government has argued variously that negotiations were stalled on the 126-fighter tender, that HAL was incapable of building the Rafale in India, and that Modi had pushed through the purchase of 36 fighters to meet the IAF’s urgent requirements, and more would follow later. The over all aim of Congress Party is to keep throwing mud relentlessly in the hope that some of it may just stick.
But those claims are contradicted by two inconvenient facts: the “emergency purchase” will be fully delivered only by 2022; and, with the more recent tender for 110 fighters still stalled, no further aircraft are in sight. The opposition is also charging the government with paying three times as much per Rafale than what the UPA government had negotiated in the 126-fighter contract. The government’s response that the fighters it has bought are more capable runs up against the fact that the Modi-Hollande joint statement stipulates an equivalent configuration.
The government could simply prove its claims by releasing details of both the tender and the current contract. Instead, it has raised suspicion by first promising to release the details and then backtracking, citing a confidentiality agreement with France. When asked in March on a visit to India whether the confidentiality agreement covered commercial details, French President Emmanuel Macron dodged the question, stating it was up to the Indian government to decide what it would release.
Paris and New Delhi are firmly aligned on tamping down the Rafale controversy. Until 2015, the Rafale was the world’s worst-selling production fighter. With no export orders, budget constraints had forced even the French military to slash its initial commitment to buying the Rafale from 336 to just 272 aircraft. Actual orders have been placed for just 180 fighters.
To keep the Rafale production line rolling in the wait for more orders, Dassault had slowed production to just 11 fighters annually. Some relief came when Egypt – the first foreign buyer – contracted for 24 Rafales in February 2015 and a Qatari order for another 24 followed in May. Even so, an order from the Indian Air Force, internationally known as a hard customer to please, was important for the fighter’s credibility. Further, having the Rafale inducted in service and its components going into initial production in India would position it nicely for competing for the IAF’s 110-fighter procurement and the Indian Navy’s separate 57-fighter tender.
The opposition also alleges Modi’s 36-Rafale contract abandons even the pretence of domestic manufacture and the opportunity for boosting India’s aerospace capability. Cutting out HAL, Anil Ambani – a businessman from Modi’s home state, Gujarat, who is widely regarded as being close to the BJP – emerged as Dassault’s key partner for discharging offset liabilities, an Indian counter-trade arrangement that requires arms vendors to plough back a percentage of their earnings into the Indian defence industry.
Hollande on Friday added to the controversy by saying New Delhi had forced Dassault to pick Ambani. “We did not have a say in that,” Hollande, who was president from 2012 to 2017. told investigative website Mediapart. The French Govt has rejected Hollande statement and even the people of France have already done so.
“In 1989, after the apparently crooked procurement of artillery guns made the Swedish arms manufacturer “Bofors” a byword for corruption in arms deals, the then-Congress government was voted out of power. Now in the opposition, the Congress is looking to make Rafale the BJP’s Bofors-scandal equivalent. Congress is just hoping that Rafale will be a bofors to BJP.
