Why Didn't Lalitaji Haggle Over Rafale?
One day in 1992, principal information officer S. Narendra was briefing the media on prime minister Narasimha Rao’s visit to France. As a young reporter on the defence beat, I asked him if there would be a deal on the extra Mirages that the IAF had asked for.
Narendra, who would serve four PMs, replied with a smile: “Young man, the prime minister of India is not an Arab sheikh to take a fancy for a plane and say, I will have a dozen of them.”
Two and half decades later, that’s what has happened. The IAF had been asking for 126 jets, 18 of them off the shelf and 108 made at home with acquired know-how. The talks with the makers of the selected jet, the Rafale, was stuck over price and service guarantees when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, flying to France and convinced that the plane was top class, ordered three dozen off the shelf, and claimed a bargain. Neither did he seek transfer of tech, nor a licence to make them at home. The defence minister wasn’t consulted, nor the cabinet. And he wouldn’t tell us the price, not on our dear lives.
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