Good rating aside, there are promises to keep on the Rafale front
India’s eight-year bid to buy a medium multi-role combat aircraft for its air force fleet took multiple barrel rolls, tumbled all the way down, and finally crashed into a ball of flames in April this year. That effort was effectively declared dead the moment Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in Paris he has expressed India’s desire to buy 36 fly-away Rafale combat planes from France.
But that’s history now. The latest is that the effort to get even the 36 Rafales off-the-shelf seems to be doing a Vertical Charlie (an extreme combat plane manoeuvre) and has gone out of control, with reports suggesting that the “go-ahead” given by the Manohar Parrikar-led Defence Acquisition Council on September 1 this year was conditional.
The 36-plane negotiations has got into the grey area of deviations from the pre-set defence procurement procedure, primarily on issues relating to the offset clause and the pricing for the readyto- fly combat jets that India wants so urgently. The deviations are so serious that these require the approval of India’s highest decisionmaking body, the Cabinet Committee on Security.
This is a clear sign of trouble brewing in the negotiations that’s been in progress for the past five months, even as there were reports that the talks were facing turbulence over the same issues. The French are as recalcitrant now as they were during the three years of negotiations for the medium multi-role combat aircraft contract that has now been scrapped for good. They just want to sell and not help India in its “Make in India” programme.
This goes against the grain of the Indian bid to create a domestic defence industrial complex that’s self-reliant to meet the needs of the Indian armed forces. Certainly, the idea of Indian self-reliance goes against the entire premise of the global defence manufacturers that India is one big market for the arms that they produce. There is a clear conflict of interest there.
India’s need for a combat plane such as the Rafale has become imperative now considering that the Indian Air Force has no other plane that could match the electronic warfare capabilities of the American F-16C/ D Block-52 that arch-rival Pakistan’s air force possesses now in its fleet.
The Pakistani F-16 can beat the Indian Su-30MKI hands down in a one-on-one dog fight with its sheer electronic warfare capability, if senior IAF officials are to be believed. Beyond Visual Range combat is an altogether different ball game. But if the Pakistani F-16 manage to penetrate the Indian air defence infrastructure, then a dog fight becomes inevitable. In such a scenario, India may have to pit two of its Su-30MKI combat jets against each F-16 that comes close to inflicting damage to Indian ground fighting units on the battlefield or strafing strategically important assets.
It is this threat that the IAF top brass wants to counter through the Rafale, which they consider to be the best bet among contemporary combat planes against the F-16s. But the threat part is only the capability aspect of the importance of India getting a medium multi-role combat aircraft for itself immediately. There is the numbers game part, too.
The IAF combat fleet strength is precariously placed at this point in time. IAF has already begun to phase out the obsolete MiG-21 and MiG-27 combat planes from its fleet, with at least three of the dozen squadrons being number-plated this year itself, with a few more in the following year.
At present, IAF has a combat fleet strength of 33 squadrons that’s short by nine squadrons already, considering that the IAF desires to have 42 squadrons that it feels is required to meet the challenge of a two-front simultaneous war by Pakistan and China, a scenario Indian military thinkers envision as definitely possible in the foreseeable future. This already weakened strength is likely to go down to just 25 squadrons in the next five years, with the MiG-21 and MiG-27 squadrons being number-plated at a faster pace than previously expected. Its worst-case scenario could remain unmitigated if the expected induction of the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft Tejas is pushed beyond the end of this decade. India plans to have at least seven squadrons of the LCA Tejas of which five will be of the Mk-2 advanced variant that could match the likes of the JF-17 that the Pakistan Air Force would have in its fleet. That’s the silver lining.
The IAF is now waiting for the stateowned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to deliver the first four LCA Mk-1 planes so that it could raise a new squadron of the indigenous combat aircraft. But the LCA Mk- 1 is yet to obtain its Final Operational Clearance to be deployed in a combat scenario.
The Indian government has approved the induction of two LCA Mk-1 squadrons and is waiting for the Mk-2 to be ready to place an order for five more of the variant for the IAF. Again, the LCA Mk-2 is still far away. Now that the original tender to have the 126 medium multi-role combat planes is no more, the IAF still seems to require another, at least, 240 combat planes, preferably in the light-weight, single-engine category, as replacements for the MiG-21s and MiG-27s that are being phased out.
The IAF combat fleet of about 650 planes will soon go down to about 400 combat jets in the next five years. It is here that the 240 more planes would add strength by keeping the fleet strength as a respectable level. This, India has to achieve before it gets to induct the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft that is being jointly developed with the Russians.
It is in this background that a quick deal for the 36 Rafales becomes unavoidable. But the kind of time overruns that the Indian decision-making and deal negotiations are known for, it’s anybody’s guess when the 36- Rafale contract could be signed and when the planes would be inducted into the IAF fleet.
Whatever happened to the Modi promise of a “better” deal to be done “within a timeline” that conforms to IAF’s operational requirements?