Indian defence officials say the decision to shun two US firms’ bid for an $11 billion fighter contract was all about technicalities. Maybe.
India’s Defence Ministry did the previously unthinkable earlier this month. As reported previously in The Diplomat, India eliminated two major US aviation firms—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—from the race to secure a lucrative $11 billion contract to supply 126 combat jets to the Indian Air Force.
After a gruelling, two-year process including field trials of the six aircraft in extreme weather conditions, the Defence Ministry shortlisted two European firms—EADS and Dassault Aviation. Swedish Firm Saab and Russian RSK MiG were the other two bidders left disappointed.
The decision sent shockwaves through Washington’s defence establishment as it had expended significant political, diplomatic and commercial capital in trying to secure the contract. Indeed, US President Barack Obama lobbied on behalf of the US firms during his November 2010 visit to New Delhi, following up with a letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
But was the decision worth the potential political fallout?
As Ashley Tellis, noted India analyst and a former security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says, ‘India has chosen a plane over a strategic partnership.’
The clear implication is that India shunned an opportunity to cement emerging strategic ties with the United States by rejecting its planes. But Air Force and Ministry officials have stuck to their guns, arguing that they made the decision based purely on the merits of the respective bids.
According to sources in both organizations, there were several factors working against the Americans, including the fact that the Indian Air Force had found that the two US planes on offer had reached their ‘technological’ limits (the Rafael and Eurofighter Typhoon were believed to have scope to add further ‘teeth’ at some point), India’s rival Pakistan uses the F-16 Super Viper being offered by Lockheed, and perhaps above all, the United States was insisting that India sign what officials believed were intrusive agreements giving the Americans the right to carry out on-site inspection of US-supplied platforms.
Lost in all the fuss over the rejection of the US firms’ offers has been that the Russians were also extremely upset that India has, in their eyes, turned its back on an almost four decades-long defence partnership with Moscow. Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is said to have personally called his Indian counterpart to express disappointment over the Indian decision.
Russia was the first of the disappointed bidders to write to the Defence Ministry, although all four have now filed, requesting more information on why their particular fighter was given the chop.
The response is no surprise to Indian officials. ‘We’ll deal with the backlash,’ one top Ministry official, who asked not to be named, told me following the filing of the letters. ‘One contract isn’t the end of a relationship. In any case, both the Americans and the Russians still have a lot of opportunities to win big contracts with India’s growing need to acquire new weapons and platforms.’
This makes sense. The Americans have already secured a significant presence in the Indian defence market, and will undoubtedly see sales boosted further in the coming years.
Photo Credit: Ruben Alexander
View as Single Page
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Sita
SupaGeek,
What ARE they teaching you in school these days?
If the Hindu-Muslim war of 1946 and the Great Partition weren’t Civil WArs, then nothing ever was. Please do Google it.
Sam
All the ‘civil wars’ you mention are due to partitioning a region in unseemly haste when the British Raj died its violent, natural death. Even the names you mention show they were not civil wars, but people moving to the side of a border where they could be in the majority so they could live in peace among others of their own religion. A bit of that was religious leaders grasping for power in the vacuum left by defeated, unthinking, callous foreigners as they felt their greedy grasp on power receding and their personal safety compromised and did not really care for what happened to the local population since they were leaving anyway after robbing these people blind over two hundred years. It is really tough when your well trained army turns on you in every place you look in your erstwhile dominion. If that is your definition of Civil War you need to reexamine your understanding of history, not least the US case. We know how that turned out in the case of Pakistan and today Balochistan so history is still being written on the Indian continent.
Sam
Wars require armies with guns and weaponry.
People were running away from each other to safety both to India and Pakistan.
People need to be fighting each other for control of land and resources.
The land and resources had already been given to Pakistan in a carve out of India. Pakistan got what it wanted so there was nothing to fight about from their side and, there was no question of India asking for anything as it was being willingly dismembered to make Pakistan.
So neither of these situations obtained in the ‘civil wars’ in India you speak about. Wonder what they taught in your school. Maybe you never went to school in the USA because what they teach here does not call India/Pakistan independence a civil war. They probably do not teach that in Pakistan, although they do not call it a civil war even there. So you really need to stop smoking that funny stuff!
Capeto
Your fresh take in this mairetal has a lot of thought-provoking ideas that really took me by surprise. I share your thoughts on many points. You really made me think.
Sita
Namaste, Sam.
I am thinking you have been very tired and maybe a little homesick when you posted your comments.
There is an old saying in that “a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable.It is what it is and has its own social and cultural norms.”
That is as true of India as it is of America. New York City is a composed of a thousand little ethnic enclaves; each is the the equivalent of a village and in a big city like New York people cling even harder to the things they know.
Well-intentioned people of any religion have the potential to be good neighbors if you don’t close them out because THEY are different.
Sam
Thanks for the patronizing comment Sita. I am neither homesick nor tired. It is not a foreign country to me any more than it is to you although in your case it may be rapidly becoming one. You are wishing for the old Eurocentric days when you could look down on new immigrants and are feeling uncomfortable about the US as it exists today. This country is no longer making you feel comfortable because the US was never designed to make you feel thus. Your definition of the US is a place where poor people from Europe come and take somebody else’s land and resources, in this case the Native Americans, and “settle down” to a life of plenty with a bunch of workers doing their bidding. That is South Africa and even there it is changing. Those days are depicted in wistful Wild West movies which are really parodies of that life and is only there because everybody (with the possible exception of people like you),knows that situation is never coming back.
This is a land of immigrants and they bring their own culture and ways of life. The old who are no longer productive have to make way for the new who are, as they are the ones who make the US what it is. You just need to get used to it and learn to live in the new multi-polar world. The social security safety net which was designed to look after a reasonable number of old people with young people’s income is being strained as the population bulges at the senior age level funded by very few working age citizens. So you need to look forward to a future like British pensioners face, even if you have money as the US currency debases to meet the needs of the exporters in this country. You can plan for a future where everything seems to get more expensive and your savings do not seem to go as far.
Workers do not want to come to the developed world to work, only to study and return to their own land to work or to start something there, because the high growth rates are not here, so there is little interest in investing and job creation here when clients and profits are elsewhere. At the same time the investor class has found that they need to invest abroad to serve new clients in the BRIC and other ‘emerging markets’ and produce goods and services there. The old model of making high priced stuff here and selling it to a few wealthy foreigners is over, they prefer buying stuff they make in companies they own. increasingly they have their own money to invest, they do not need yours, they can borrow from the country next door if they do not have enough for a particular project.
I am not closing anybody out as far as my neighbors are concerned, we are very happy together, just the people proselytizing and abridging my freedom of religion and people who do not exhibit any understanding of the reality today, people like you. You are unable to accept that because it is your religion and you feel it should be free to do what it wants. Small problem, that is against the law in the USA! And all the dirty religious laundry being aired in public in country after country does not help matters. It is really difficult to seem pristine and pious when you feed on your own kids.
I like the way you moved smoothly from rural to urban without skipping a beat and your gratuitous appropriation of a Hindu name and Hindu greeting. You are probably the kind of person who would copy a yoga practice and attempt to patent it so other Hindus cannot use it without paying you a fee even though they have been freely using it for a few thousand years! Believe me, it has been tried and struck down in the courts. For you it is just another market segment to profit from, which if true, seems kinda really cold. That does not sound American to me.
D.Bose
USA has offered junk air-crafts F-16, which US Air Force is putting into its dustbin or giving away free to Pakistan.
F-16 is equivalent to Russian MIG-29, which India is producing for a long time. Why on earth India will buy the same from USA for $12 Billion?
Indo-US nuclear treaty is another. Whatever Bush has offered, Obama took away from India. India is now being treated as one of the non-nuclear countries that had signed the NPT. It looks like Indo-US treaty now nothing but a trick to eliminate India’s nuclear weapons programme.
Because USA changes its president every 4 years, there is no consistency in USA’s approach towards India.
Sita
D. Bose:
I had just finished reading “In Spite of the God’s” by Edward Luce and was thinking how refreshing it was that Bush had done something right for once.
It is indeed too bad that the current administration, which usually (albeit clumsily) does try hard, I think, to do the right thing has reversed that policy.
Being surrounded by nuclear nations really does put India at a serious disadvantage. Somebody, maybe Henry Kissinger, once wrote that “India lives in a bad neighborhood.” I expect there are many Americans who empathize with you.
Sam
Once the five Permanent members and their nuclear ICBMs exist, everybody in the world is in a “bad neighborhood”. The difference is that India has its own and soon will join these permanent veto wielding members. Better the right to a veto at the UNSC than a veto atop an ICBM I always say. You sure you are an American “Sita” if that is your real name?
Sam
Again, while it may have seemed to be a ‘bad neighborhood’ in Kissinger’s time it is now home to the two fastest growing economies in the world and unlike the Asian Tigers and Japan, these people have huge heft and are changing the world order because of the size of their population, so everything they do is magnified in the numbers of people affected. They are each moving a population equivalent to the US out of poverty every year and China is much farther along since it started earlier. Pakistan which is the latecomer to this revelation is slowly but surely getting the message as its foreign bankers/backers gradually pull back from funding what is ultimately state sponsored terrorism when they attack the hand that feeds them.
Unlike Kissinger who was prescient and convinced Nixon to open up to China, you are still living in an antebellum past, so you need to move on and smell the new reality around you. We will move you kicking and screaming into the 21st century whether you like it or not, not because we want to, but because that is the way progress is. The old tired model of developed world countries importing raw materials cheaply everywhere and exporting expensive finished goods is now the new Chinese model, with the difference that the finished goods are not that expensive so more people can afford them and killing off the developed world’s manufacturing and jobs.