[India’s Tapas BH 201 drone]

There are good reasons for redoubled skepticism about Narendra Modi’s policy of atmnirbharta (self-sufficiency) in armaments. My books and writings over the past decade have detailed why it seems to be more a political slogan than a serious substantive programme the Indian government, Defence Ministry, and the Indian military are committed to.

While the services’ chiefs of staff ceaselessly talk of atmnirbharta, in actual practice indigenous weapons programmes aren’t afforded half a chance to survive an imports-tilted military procurement process. There are many villains to blame for this state of affairs, for the country’s still being an abject arms dependency — a shameful status annually broadcast by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In March 2023, SIPRI reminded the world that India had once again topped the list of countries with the highest arms imports, accounting for 11% of global arms sales (followed by Saudi Arabia at 9.6%), a position it has held, incidentally, since 1993, i.e., in a time span covering both Congress Party and BJP governments. This factual record pretty much hollows out the current claims for ‘atmnirbhar Bharat’ in defence.

There are many culprits, in the main — Defence Research & Development Organisation and the armed services. DRDO has grown fat on promises it has made to the nation and the military without consistently delivering on them. No DRDO project has EVER produced a piece of military hardware within the original time and cost parameters. Indeed, it has perfected a modus operandi detailed in my 2015 book — Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet), that perpetually feathers its own nest whilst shrugging off responsibility. This is how it works: the initial financial outlays on any major programme are used, not to invest in technology creation, installation of production wherewithal or related activity, but in building staff quarters for the prospective project personnel complete with officers’ clubs amd swimming pools! After a few thousand crores are first spent on this extraneous construction and passage of several years of colonising some new parcel of hundreds of acres of defence land usually in and around Bangalore or Hyderabad, DRDO goes back to the government asking for funds to actually get the project going! By then the original weapon system the project was tasked to produce is, technology-wise, already approaching obsolescence, and the concerned armed service wants to have nothing to do with it. Worse, more often than not, the weapons system finally produced is the result of DRDO cobbling together something out of imported components and assemblies and pasting DRDO labels on the finished product! Thus, whole projects are rendered a gigantic waste of national wealth and resources whilst generally creating no worthwhile assets in-country.

On the more critical high tech projects such as, say, the nuclear-powered submarine and the Tejas light combat aircraft, the programmes shuffled along for years and years without any sense of urgency or accountability. Criticism of such DRDO projects is rarely voiced by services’ chiefs seeing what happened to the naval chief, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, when he did so in the mid-90s. The CNS had asked for a formal audit of the N-sub (Advanced Technology Vehicle) prgramme, and instead got an earful of high sounding nationalist sentiment — precursor to the Modi-era atmanirbharta rhetoric — from the then DRDO head, the late Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in a cabinet meeting that silenced all doubters — political and military alike. It was a tactic Kalam often employed to dissuade anybody from questioning or criticising DRDO.

The armed services discovered that the non-performing DRDO was a perfect foil and platform for them to secure imported fighting machines, preferably of Western origin, failing which from the Russian source, that their hearts desired. (Why the preference for Western? Which Indian Service minds repeated pleasurable trips for relays of senior officers to Paris, London, Stockholm, Washington, etc with all the frills, generously hosted by the governments/arms companies standing to make billions of dollars from Indian sales?) Further, the military alighted on four procedural hurdles to ensure DRDO projects never get delivered on time.

Firstly, the armed services refuse to become full stake holders or take ownership of any project that would, in effect, yoke their operational futures to speedy and successful completion of the projects and the rollout of the promised weapons system. Secondly, the military services demand that the very first tested and proven prototype meet all operational specifications — otherwise, it is thumbs down at the first instance! Thirdly, they change the QRs (Qualitative requirements) at will after the design is already consensually frozen, necessitating redesign, thereby inducing unconscionable time and cost overruns on the project, with the delays thus caused being used to pressure the government into allowing import of the desired foreign hardware the Services had their eyes on from the beginning! And finally, they refuse to follow the protocol all advanced militaries working in conjuncrtion with their defence industries do of “parallel development and induction”. This is how it works: Induct into service small numbers of the first prototype Mark 1 version that’s undergone initial certification. It enables continuous technical feedback on performance and design features so the system can be expeditiously improved ergonomically, and certain design kinks ironed out and features tweaked — flaws that become evident only with operational use by experienced users. The changes from the initial and subsequent feedback from frontline users (pilots, tank commanders, gunners, etc) are quickly inputted to ready on an accelerated schedule the finished product for final certification, and okayed for massive serial production.

Time and again, DRDO programmes have been thus hindered. The most egregious example is the Tejas LCA project that suffered from all the above hurdles and was forced to limp along, being reduced by the IAF to a plaything, using the resulting slow pace of the project to create a dire situation only to pressure the government into accepting the import solution!! It is a miracle Tejas somehow survived, avoiding the fate of the Dr Raj Mahindra-designed Marut HF-71 (the much improved variant of the Dr Kurt Tank-designed HF-24) that the IAF mercilessly killed off just so it could, in the early 1980s, buy the British Jaguar low level strike aircraft. Tejas emerged nevertheless as a great showcase of Indian talent and technological ingenuity inspite of the IAF’s dogged and stealthy attempts to undermine it at every turn until now, when under political pressure, the Service has grudgingly accepted it without, however, giving it and its successor twin-engined advanced medium combat aircraft project its full hearted support. Whence the buys of the prohibitively expensive Rafale fighter from France, etc. Hardly to be wondered why President Macron (like Francoise Hollande before him) is giddy with relief to keep the French aviation industry afloat by selling more such high value cost-ineffective combat aircraft to the premier Third World arms buying sucker in the marketplace –India!

The problem is the Indian military’s love for everything Western — colonial hangover anyone? It shapes the armed services’ contempt for any military goods of indigenous design and manufacture. In such a milieu, one would expect the politician in the defence minister’s post to step in, apply his mind, and order the armed services to stop their obstacle-erecting shenanigans, and to prove that the government means business where atmnirbharta is concerned, terminate the services of a couple of service chiefs — the only way to guarantee the message gets home to the military.

This, of course, won’t happen because since 1947, the late Manohar Parrikar apart, defence ministers have been overcautious headscratchers or provincial dolts. Expecting them to challenge the services’ chiefs is to expect far too much from them. After all, do you expect Rajnath Singh, who is routinely referred in senior military circles as a “duffer”, to act in the nation’s interest? No hope there.

What about responsible defence ministry bureaucrats applying the brakes on such excess, bearing in mind the government’s overarching goal of atmbirbharta? No luck there, either, because most civil servants Defence Secretary on down are generalists who are all at sea, learning on the job, for most of their tenures, and/or because they believe it is their remit to keep the underperforming DRDO and the horribly wasteful defence public sector units, such as HAL, Mazgaon, et al, from sinking. So, with an illiterate media as handmaid, what we have is propagation of the atmanirbharta myth with the usual periodic hooplas. Thus, everytime Garden Reach or Mazgaon Shipyard produces a warship, a missile destroyer, say INS Imphal, the boat is hailed as a tech marvel, the ultimate in local effort and technological development with “80% indigenous content”. Nowhere is revealed the god awful truth that the 80 percent indigenous is by weight, not value. And that this has been the case from the time the first Leander-class frigates were put together in the 1960s!

What happened to retard genuine indigenous design and development of industral age weapons systems such as warships, Tejas LCA and the Arjuna main battle tank, is now being faced by new age systems, like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Consider the Tapas BH-201 medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) UAV optimised for ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, Tracking, and Reconnaissance) roles for the three services. Equipped with electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar packages to enable surveillance even in cloudy weather, it was designed to fly at 30,000 feet altitude for 24 hours. Initiated in 2016, the Tapas UAV by July last year had logged its 200th successful test flight and was handed over to the military for user trials, with the navy first up.

By Autumn 2023, however, with the joint trials underway, doubts began to be raised about Tapas UAV falling short by a few thousand feet on its cruising altitude and on its inability to carry weapons, which was strange because an attack capability was NOT in the original specifications! It is a drone meant for surveillane, for God’s sake! So how come the army and air force are getting away by rejecting the locally designed and produced Tapas because it cannot also carry ordnance which it was never meant to do? Anyway, these were the excuses the three armed Services trotted out for drastically cutting their offtake that had originally been pegged at 76 UAVs. Tapas, mind you, is a flying surveillance platform ready for use that is being ditched because the military suddenly woke up to the fact that they needed an armed drone! The army and IAF say they’d rather wait another 3-4 years for DRDO to develop the Archer NG (new generation) UAV with all of Tapas’ ISTAR prowess plus weapon carrying capacity.

Couldn’t the Tapas UAV, by way of an interim immediate solution, have been jerry-rigged by BEL/HAL to carry a weapon even if this reduced the drone’s cruising altitude and endurance? It is an obvious solution, but who wants that?

 [the MQ-9B]

In the event, what does the Indian military propose to do in the meantime? Why, pay up $3 billion (!!!!) for 31 US-built MQ-9A/Bs UAVs, of course! The Sea and Sky Guardian American drones can fly for 27 hours at speeds reaching 240 knots and at 50,000 feet altitude, and 1,746 kilograms of payload capacity, inclusive of 1,361 kilos of external stores (per brochure info). The MQ-9A sale was in a limbo because the Biden Administration was holding it up for many months in order to armtwist the Modi regime into a “meaningful investigation” into the alleged Indian government role in the plot to assassinate a Khalistani terrorist enjoying safe haven in the US. Perhaps, Modi succumbed to American pressure, or told Washington where to get off, it isn’t clear which, but the US government has just cleared the transfer of the MQ-9A/Bs.

What this means is the Sea/Sky Guardians India has fully paid for will remain hostage to US policy dictates, even as the Tapas UAV languishes. And, more worryingly, that atmanirbharta in defence still remains what it has always been — a receding horizon.