NEW DELHI - Any future Indian purchase of Rafale fighter jets will only come about through direct negotiations with the French government, the defence minister has said, effectively killing off talks about a massive deal.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last week that New Delhi had ordered 36 of the planes from France in a multi-billion-dollar agreement that has been years in the making. But Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said late on Monday that any future deals will be negotiated directly between the two governments, rather than between the manufacturer and Indian bureaucrats. “All deal(s) will be in G2G only,” Parrikar told reporters in New Delhi, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. “The reason we have taken 36 directly is to ensure that they are inducted into the air force at the earliest,” he also told the IBN 7 network.
The minister said the original negotiations to buy 126 Rafale jets from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation - that have been dragging on since 2012 - had gone into a “vortex” or a “loop”, with no solution in sight. “The process is stalled. It has hit a wall and is not getting (any) result,” he told IBN 7.
But he stopped short of saying the government had scrapped talks altogether on the deal, which was originally estimated at $12 billion and has now reportedly ballooned to $20 billion.
“Instead of going through the Request for Proposal (RFP) route where there was (a) lot of confusion and chaos, it was decided that we will go through the G2G route,” he said. “It should have never gone through an RFP. (The) earlier government should have taken the decision to work on a government to government deal,” he said.
In France, President Francois Hollande said, “we had to move very quickly for the 36” jets ordered last week. “For the rest, this is up for debate with our partner,” added the president, stressing that Delhi “had confidence” in Paris.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, for his part, put the ball squarely in Delhi’s court. “It’s up to the Indian authorities to say what they want to do for the future,” he said.
Dassault won the right in January 2012 to enter exclusive negotiations with India to supply 126 Rafale fighters under the previous Congress-led government.
But the deal has been bogged down in tortuous negotiations over cost and guarantee over assembly of the planes in India.
The original deal was for Dassault to supply 18 of the twin-engine fighters, while the remaining 108 would be made by state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd under technology transfer agreements with India.
Defence analyst Rahul Bedi said current talks between Dassault and India to supply the rest of the Rafales were now dead, but he did not rule out future deals.
Bedi said it “makes no logistic, economic or common sense” for India just to purchase 36 Rafales when the air force desperately needed many more jets to replace its ageing fleet.
“The (current) negotiations hit such a roadblock that the only option was to walk away from the deal,” Bedi, from IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, told AFP.
Modi announced the 36 jets had been ordered after talks with Hollande during a visit to France, the first leg of his maiden trip to Europe.
India has launched a vast defence modernisation programme worth some $100 billion, partly to keep up with rival neighbours Pakistan and China.
Sameer Patil, defence analyst at the Gateway House think-tank based in Mumbai, said government-to-government talks were “less cumbersome than commercial bidding”.