Smoke and mirrors

Smoke and mirrors

The Rafale deal is mired in surmises and that is not helping the government’s cause.

With the Supreme Court evincing interest in the decision making procedure followed by government in inking the Rafale deal coinciding with fresh revelations by French investigative website Mediapart, government must do a better job of explaining its side of the story. Mediapart claims to have accessed an internal Dassault document in which a company executive terms the joint venture (JV) with Anil Ambani’s Reliance Defence as a “trade-off” and “imperative and mandatory” to secure the Rs 59,000 crore deal.

The purchase of Rafale fighters shouldn’t have become controversial given its criticality for our air defence and despite winning IAF’s unstinted approval. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to France in April 2015 and the MoU signed with French President Francois Hollande for 36 Rafale jets in a flyaway condition was initially met with relief because a breakthrough had been elusive for years. No less promising was the offsets condition weaved into the contract signed in September 2016 to ensure that projects worth Rs 30,000 crore would be made in India.

Subsequently, Dassault Aviation went ahead and identified 72 French and Indian offset partners but it was the choice of Reliance Defence as Dassault’s JV partner that raised eyebrows. Reliance Defence – the second biggest beneficiary of offsets after the government-owned Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) – was incorporated as a company just two weeks before the Rafale MoU. Perceiving a chink in the government’s armour Congress has rushed in, alluding to Anil Ambani’s companies heavily in debt and insinuating cronyism. It has been helped by government’s timidity to answer the fundamental questions like pricing and procedures, even as Hollande’s claim that it was India which proposed Reliance Defence also appeared to contradict government’s stance that under the deal’s terms only Dassault could choose offset partners.

Congress appears to have discovered its own ‘Bofors’ in the Rafale deal without, however, remotely comparable circumstantial evidence. Its compulsions here could be political, as it knows that in the cutthroat atmosphere of today’s politics and with critical elections coming up, BJP is primed to raise Congress corruption as an issue. Rafale can potentially serve a pre-emptive strike that neutralises the blow. However, there’s no gainsaying that the air force needs the aircraft badly. One can only hope that the Rafale deal – and concomitant opportunities provided by offsets – do not fall victim to government handling of the deal and India’s partisan politics.