The Rafale soars

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The Rafale soars

Saturday, 15 December 2018 | Pioneer

The Rafale soars

The Supreme Court’s putting down of the allegations on the jet deal is welcome news for the Modi Government

Before a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, pronounced their judgement on whether further investigations were necessary on the Rafale case, both sides —  the ruling BJP and the rabble-rousers who have been hammering on about this case egged on by Rahul Gandhi himself — were prepared for a very different judgement. Some in the ruling dispensation had steeled themselves for an unfavourable judgement. The expectation of a Court-monitored Special Investigative Team (SIT) kept all of Narendra Modi’s detractors happy. After all, the opposition seems to have pinned down a strategy of painting Modi as corrupt, both financially and morally. So much so that when the judgement was read out, emotions went in completely opposite directions. The BJP, deflated after the recent state poll results where there is no doubt that the Rafale deal played a part, got a booster shot when the expected prognosis was worse. The Congress and its army of rabble-rousers were shocked into silence in social media, and this was not even a Chief Justice about whom they could spread insinuations like they did with the recently retired Justice Dipak Misra. All they could do was latch on to the court’s observation that the CAG report on Rafale was given to the Parliament’s Public Account Committee, which  they claimed was not true.

But the happiest people today ought to be the strategists in the Defence Ministry and the officers and men of the Indian Air Force. With the Rafale deal now certified by the Supreme Court, there is no doubt that the first of the planes manufactured in France will land in India in late 2019. It was as if in anticipation of the verdict that Dassault, the manufacturers of the fighter jet, released a picture of the first plane to be delivered to India undergoing flight testing off the French Atlantic coast. However with India’s frontline fighter fleet severely depleted and still depending on 30 to 40-year-old jets, the approval of this deal will not change the situation dramatically on the frontlines. India needs to place a follow-up order to these 36 planes as soon as possible, and while the Defence Ministry has issued a Request for Information from global manufacturers for a 110-plane order, one hopes that does not descend into a horrible farce all over again. We are not only at risk for a technically-advanced and burgeoning People’s Liberation Army Air Force but also at risk of losing pilots unnecessarily because they fly outdated jets older than themselves. One way to ensure this is that the government does take the opposition at least in confidence about the necessity of the deal and why the winning contender was selected. The need for new fighter jets for the Indian Air Force should trump politics, and so should be the need to develop a private sector military-industrial complex. The government should have been less arrogant and the Opposition should have resorted to less grandstanding on this issue. Now that everything has been resolved, we should bury the body of the Rafale scam and hope that its ghost stays six feet underground.

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