[Rafale]

The Indian Air Force is the most luckless airforce in the world and its leadership is to blame for it. Once marked out as the leading force of an “Icarian India” with its span stretching from the Maghreb to Australasia, it is now reduced to something that is repeatedly beaten by so puny a thing as the Pakistan Air Force. What a fall! To pretend the IAF can take on the PLA Air Force, is to dream! But dream on!

In a pattern of longstanding, the IAF has been led by persons apparently determined to steer the force into the ground, much like the hot-dogging pilot with deficient flying skills, who destroyed the export potential of the Tejas by flying the plane into the desert sands at the UAE airshow a few months back.

It is nevertheless a mystery — the kind of hook Paris has into the Indian government. It is as if the Quai d’Orsay can make the Modi regime, the latest in the line, to do virtually anything it wants it to do. Forget about how French defence companies keep tabs, nurture support for the wares they peddle by courting promising military officers, Wing Commander level up, with all kinds of comfy attention, and by conducting lavishly hosted trips to Paris with all its allurements for the flagrank, and even media persons. And one hears too tid-bits of information pertaining to monies diverted into accounts of the ruling party of the day. But these are secondary factors. The real reason for France’s success lies elsewhere — in its promises relating to nuclear technology that it does not intend to ever deliver on, but means to use to successfully string India along. Our Prime Ministers, who are as inncocent of any technical knowledge as their generalist civil servants they rely on for advise, are seduced by such promises.

At the top are the twin nuclear promises relating to the transfer of miniature nuclear reactor technology to power submarines and aircraft carriers, and to provide Indian nuclear scientists access to the French Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) chamber — the Laser Megajoule facility near Bordeaux. The ICF creates extraordinarily high temperatures by firing lasers at nuggets of fusion fuel to create miniature thermonuclear explosions that help refine Hydrogen Bomb designs, something sorely needed because the Indian thermonuclear device tested in 1998 was a dud. What with the late, little lamented, Dr R Chidambaram, the greatest disaster to befall the nation’s nuclear weapons project, singlehandedly ensuring the capping of the Indian arsenal at the low yield fission level with his argument that India needed no additional testing beyond the 1998 tests, and then seeing to it that the small ICF facility in Indore was run into a state of such disrepair as to render it non-functional.

Hence, the importance of the French carrots dangled before the donkey of an Indian government that made Delhi successively buy the Mirage 2000, the scorpene diesel submarine, and now the Rafale — all incredibly wasteful deals that because of time and cost overruns have ended up costing the exchequer a third more than their original price tags of tens of billions of dollars — totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, and all because the Indian government never applied its mind, because it has no mind to apply.

The IAF’s procurement priorities are realised, aided and abetted by the apparatus of state that does not know its arm from its elbow where air warfare or any other military or mil-tech issue is concerned, and relies on advice from the very source — the Chief of the Air Staff who, personally, has the most to gain from it. Isn’t there a conflict of interest here? I am referring strictly to the metric the military services informally use to evaluate their chief of the day — whether he acquires for the service a prized foreign fighter plane, an aircraft carrier, or an imported tank, helicopter fleet, or artillery system. To be fair, the navy and army are no different — but these services are less egregious, less in the public’s face, in their acquisition objectives. The IAF keeps cawing about such deals enabling the service to reach its 42.5 squadron strength, that was recommended by the JRD Tata Committee post-1962 War. Technology has since moved on, but not so the IAF — it is sticking to that figure to cover up for its ills.

Because, performance-wise, what has the IAF, outfitted with the latest Western aircraft as per its wishes, done in war? In the 3-day farce — Op Sindoor, for instance, it managed to get one or more of its Rafales — supposedly the most advanced plane in its inventory, shot up on the very first day, and just like that over a billion dollars went down the drain. It matched the 1999 Kargil conflict record, when again, it lost two aircraft on the trot on the very first day.

What the IAF has done magnificently well, however, is burnish the reputation of the Pakistan Air Force and its indigenously assembled ex-Chinese JF-17, that secured it the IAF Rafale kills. So much so, that combined with the IAF piloted Tejas mishap, countries like Indonesia that had seriously considered buying the Indian aircraft begged off, bought the Pak-built JF-17s instead and then, by way of spillover beneficial effect, also bought the drones the Pakistan defence industry produces! Bangladesh, Iraq, and Libya have lined up to buy the Block II version of the 4.5 generation Pakistan-made Chinese aircraft complete with an AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radar and a Chinese off boresight air-to-air missile from a family of PL missiles that brought down the Indian Rafales, all available for a paltry $30 million.

India excepted, there are no Third World countries around anymore for Western countries to rip off. They have all wisened up. Why would they go in for a 4.5 gen Rafale — Iraq and Libya are also where the French feverishly pitched this plane, that India is paying $337 million per piece for when, for the same amount, they can buy ten of the JF-17s which, as Sindoor showed, blew the Indian Rafales out of the skies? Or, the $337 million could have bought 2-3 Tejas Mk1A, an aerodynamically and otherwise far superior aircraft to the JF-17. So, India remains the lone village idiot.

But the math indicates an even more ruinous outcome: With Rs 3.2 lakh crores, or US $38.4 billion (at the conversion rate of INR 83-84 for a US dollar) committed for 114 Rafale, where’s the money for the Modi government to spare for any indigenously designed and developed aircraft? And, mind you, this sum only accounts for the platforms, all the weapons — the A2A Meteor and the A2G Hammer mssiles cost a whole deal of extra, again in the billions of dollars! And comfortingly for HAL, the deal will only have it do what it has ever done — screwdriver 96 Rafales from semi-knocked down kits at its assembly lines, as it did the MiG-21s, MiG-27s, Jaguars and Su-30MKIs without, in the process, gaining for the country an iota of combat aircraft design and development capability.

Further, the Rafale draft-contract stamps India as the go-to country for any Western government keen on having its defence industry subsidised by the Indian taxpayer. Not to miss out out on the feast, the German Chancellor Merz too came hither, happily flew kites with Modi and, for his troubles, pocketed a multi-billion dollar contract for the HDW 214 diesel submarine. This when the country makes nuclear-powered submarines for God’s sake!, and needed only to buy a conventional sub design and few select technologies, like optronic masts, which the Germans would have happily sold for a fraction of the cost of the entire, and entirely redundant and useless, HDW 214 package!

To return to the Rafale, the French were so brazenly confident that they could force the issue that Dassault did not concede a millimeter, and the final contract involves no transfer of source codes. This means that integrating every little Indian designed and produced ordnance or avionics tech, will necessitate going to the French company which will charge a hefty sum to do the needful — talk of bleeding a customer to death, and this will be for the duration of the aircraft’s 35-year service life. Moreover, indigenisation of the Rafale production starting at 30% will never exceed 60%! The negatives of such deals are many, and have been publicly raised for years and years now — mostly, I confess, by me in my writings. But these issues are not unknown to Indian defence ministry negotiators. In the event, the price negotiation team, involving IAF brass, should be held accountable for defalcation. May be a future government will investigate these deals.

Then again, Indian negotiating teams are the darlings of Western governments for a reason — they play the perfect saps and suckers, and can be sold any bill of goods. Go ask the American negotiators how surprisingly easy it was to get the Jaishankar-led MEA team to agree to non-resumption of nuclear testing as condition for “civilian nuclear cooperation” in the 2008 nuclear deal with the US!

But for Air Chief Marshal Aman Preet Singh the Rafale purchase will prove a boon, cementing his reputation within the air force, at least. But it will just as surely relegate the IAF to the category of a third rate, foreign-dependent force — a status it was sliding towards for some time now, and fully deserves. In comparison, PAF is a second rate air force because it does more with less, even as the IAF, in contrast, is habituated to doing less with more. And, of course, the Rafale deal, as expected, will sound the deathknell for the Tejas Mk1A, Mk 2, and the advanced medium combat aircraft programmes — starved of funding so that the French firms led by Dassault can prosper.

But what does Aman Preet Singh care? Like his army and navy counterparts, he has specialised in talking up atmbirbharta to please the ignorant political bosses while plonking for imported goods. Predictably, Singh is in the running to replace General Anil Chauhan as CDS! If his record as CAS is any guide, Good Bye theaterisation!

The Prime Minister ceaselessly lectures the people about taking pride in swadeshi, and asks young talent to contribute to India’s startup-nation credentials, but his government still ends up getting pressured into buying imported weapons systems even as the military services chiefs pay no end of lip service to the desirability of arms self-sufficiency! But the record is irrefutable that, other than impoverishing the country, none of these exorbitantly priced Western armaments have done much of anything in actual military operations other than failing.