A major goal of our foreign policy is to safeguard our security. We are not members of any military alliance, which means that we have to essentially rely on ourselves to deal with day-to-day threats to our security.
This requires us to be as self-reliant as possible for our defence needs. So long as we are dependent on foreign defence suppliers we cannot have full elbow room to conduct an independent foreign policy, despite success in developing our strategic capabilities on our own.
That we are one of the world’s largest arms importers shows how we have mismanaged vital aspects of our defence preparedness. Russia has been our biggest defence partner and has contributed in significant ways to make us more secure, but we have not been able to leverage that relationship to build a genuine domestic defence manufacturing base, one going beyond license manufacturing.
India needs to be ‘self reliant’ in arms. Pictured is Dassault’s Rafale fighter jet at the Dubai Air Show
The almost $15 billion (Rs 96.7 thousand crore) worth of arms we have bought from the US in the last few years has given us tools to defend ourselves better against threats to our security, but this has created another external dependency.
Partner
That we have been declared a major defence partner by the US should ideally mean that we will be assisted to develop an indigenous defence manufacturing base and not merely have easier access to high quality American arms on a par with US allies.
So far, it does not appear that Trump’s remark, that India and the US as the world’s largest democracies should also have the strongest militaries, means anything more than expectations that India will buy more US weapons.
We have had a long-standing defence relationship with major European countries such as France, UK and Germany, but this has not resulted in the establishment of our own capacity to produce the weapons we need.
Technology transfer remains a big hurdle, not to mention our own inadequate industrial capacity and R&D as well as lack of skilled manpower. We ourselves are to blame for this highly unsatisfactory state of affairs.
Leaving aside the failure of policy all these years to develop an indigenous defence manufacturing base, even our polices to procure defence equipment from abroad have been in shambles. The many scandals associated with defence acquisitions in the past continue to cast a shadow on new contracts that we enter into.
Since we are one of the largest market in the world for arms, competition among defence equipment suppliers is intense and all means, fair or foul, are used either to win contracts or deny them to rivals.
Controversies are generated around contracts by alleging irregularities in processing them and often the political class is used to channel such accusations which, however motivated they may appear to be, compel the bureaucrats and their political superiors to repeatedly review them, if only to protect themselves from investigations later on for complicity in some form when governments change.
It is already well known how acquisitions of needed equipment have been inordinately delayed because of these infirmities in our defence procurement system.
Controversy
All this is relevant to the controversy being generated around the Rafale deal, which is unfortunate for many reasons. Our Air Force has been clamouring for urgent action to address the issue of its depleting squadron strength which could no longer be ignored.
Dassault had won the tender for 126 combat aircraft, out-competing international rivals on both technology and price counts, but the contract could not be concluded despite prolonged negotiations.
The Modi government had to make the difficult choice of scrapping the contract altogether – at the cost of our strategic partnership with France – and ignoring the distress of the Air Force or meet its urgent requirements partially by purchasing only 36 aircraft off the shelf on condition that the overall terms would be improved and delivery would be accelerated, for which an intergovernmental agreement was signed. These facts are on public record.
If purchases from the US under governmental agreements have avoided controversies over possibly inflated costs, etc, the Rafale contract under a similar agreement with France should preclude any such controversy too.
Private
The involvement of the private sector in fulfiling some aspects of the Rafale contract is consistent with the Modi government’s declared policy of involving the private sector in defence manufacturing as part of the Make in India programme.
Broadening the base of defence manufacturing in the country will require reducing the already overloaded public sector units and increasing the participation of the Indian private sector, which is why foreign defence firms are being asked to build partnerships with them.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing have tied up with Indian private firms and so has Airbus to demonstrate their commitment to the Make in India programme. Dassault’s tie up with an Indian company is within this policy framework too.
Opposition parties should therefore avoid generating controversies over defence procurement where facts do not justify this, and consider the adverse impact of such politicking on our relations with our strategic partners.
The French have been forced to counter the allegations being made as it affects the country’s reputation, besides unnecessarily affecting potential follow-on orders.
It is also against national security and the commercial interests of foreign companies as well to reveal the details of defence contracts beyond a point.
Our political actors should be cautious in wanting to make electoral capital out of sensitive defence issues