Opposition to Rafale is against national interest

The government has been late to respond to the crisis; it shouldn’t have allowed the deal to become controversial

If India’s foreign policy and defence interests, concerns about its image abroad, the maturity of political debate on a sensitive security issue, and plain common sense had been governing considerations, the debate over the Rafale deal would not have lost its moorings as it has.

Some facts are clear. With its depleting strength, the Indian Air Force has been clamouring for more combat aircraft for years. Dassault’s Rafale won the tender for the acquisition of 126 combat aircraft, with 18 aircraft to be supplied in a flyaway condition and the rest manufactured in India by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) with technology transfer. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government could not finalise the contract because of various reasons widely reported then: life-cycle cost issues, Dassault’s refusal to guarantee the HAL-produced aircraft with respect to quality stan- dards, timelines and cost.

Faced with this impasse, the re-tendering option would have delayed acquisition, without certainty that any foreign private company would guarantee and accept liabilities for HAL-manufactured aircraft. The other option was to avoid this vexatious issue and order a number of flyaway aircraft to meet the pressing need of the Indian Air Force. However, the second option without technology transfer would thwart the ‘Make in India’ goal. Raising the flyaway number from 18 to only 36 would have appeared a pragmatic compromise. In the past, too, we have ordered a limited number of aircraft to meet immediate requirements. However, for technology transfer and boosting domestic defence manufacturing, the offsets route has been used by involving the private sector and raising the offset requirement from 30% to 50%.

Involving a private company in the Rafale contract has not been a sudden initiative. The debate on involving the private sector in defence manufacturing has been current, with policies framed and fine tuned periodically. It is recognised that while HAL has capacities that no private sector company can match, it is saturated with work and is criticised for performance shortfalls. Additional capacity had to be in the form of a non-public sector unit. Most western defence industry is privately owned and as we buy defence equipment from them, procuring it from a private Indian company with a foreign partnership should not be a problem.

France, India’s defence partner since the 1950s, stood by us in 1998. Instead of scrapping the Rafale contract entirely, salvaging a part of it to meet our own priority needs as well as preserving our equation with our first strategic partner among western countries would have seemed a sensible foreign policy course to the Modi government. The Opposition, too, should see the larger picture as whoever holds power in India will be dealing with France.

In a competitive market, no supplier wants to reveal the true cost of equipment and components sold to another country, and hence the confidentiality clause. The government has broadly indicated the cost of the Rafale contract, but divulging every detail of the deal