… more on India’s capitulation and its media coverage.
While the Russians have completely commercialised their relations with India, the Indian establishment continues to view our relations with Russia through the prism of Cold War and pre-Putin era. The initial analysis from the IRIGC meeting at Moscow last week has showcased a meek Indian surrender at the bilateral talks. As more details come in, the story turns out to be even more sordid. Live Fist has examined in depth the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) deal.
…the Indian government and air force have been vigorously insistent – reasonably so – that they be part of the design phase [of the PAK-FA]. As it happens, this was not to be. It emerges that a dossier of baseline QRs was forwarded to the Russians in late 2006, but these were returned as the design phase was already frozen.
An informed comment by Abhiman on the Live Fist post further clarifies the matter.
The PAK-FA is a Russian airframe, built as per Russian requirements. Only some of its sub-systems will be modified by India for its own use. By being a 50% financial partner, in essence, India has euphemistically purchased the licence production rights for the PAK-FA in India and also got the rights to modify some non-critical sub-systems for its own requirement.
Russia is forcing India to sign an IPR, which signifies that it intends to safeguard its proprietary technology, and not share it with India. Besides, there have been numerous Russian articles in “Kommersant” and “Russian Aviation” in which Sukhoi officials have been unambiguously quoted as saying that India’s role is primarily that of a financier only. Only at a later stage will India be ‘allowed’ to ‘modify’ some parts for its ‘own use’.
This is confirmed by the Reuters report as well.
State-run Sukhoi corporation will develop the fifth-generation fighter for Russia, and under the accord signed after two days of talks, it will then be jointly modified for India.
Live Fist also uncovers the Russian insistence on dishonouring old agreements and how India has signed away the gains of past negotiations.
And most recently, India bowing to Russia’s demand for a 5 per cent cost escalation on the enormous Flanker deal signed in the late 1990s. This last deal was one built on political good faith – India didn’t need these fighters at the time. It was a political favour to Moscow, still reeling from the aftershock of shutting down Red Russia. The vicious commercialization of relations has caught India off guard – New Delhi remains in a dream world of the past. Hilariously, Russia has voiced problems about investing India’s debt to Moscow as India’s share of the FGFA investment. Sorry, but I can’t think of a single reason why this should be so. A political leash for the future?
Many in India criticise the US as a fickle and untrustworthy ally but what have they got to say about the Russians? The Russians are more mercantile than the US now and trust, credibility and promises have no meaning in Putin’s Russia. It is high time India stopped looking at its relations with Russia through the prism of Soviet era agreements and expect reciprocal goodwill for bailing out Boris Yeltsin by signing redundant defence deals. A resurgent and assertive Russia is a hardnosed bargainer where there is no place for sentimentalities of a bygone era.
While the Indian print media felled innumerable trees to cover the Indo-US nuclear deal, there has been perfunctory coverage of the Indo-Russian deal. Everyone across the intellectual spectrum, bar the owners and editors (if there are any still left), continue to lament the lack of balance and proportion in the coverage of events by the Indian media. The ire is commonly directed towards the television news channels, especially the non-english ones, for their extensive coverage of frivolous and trivial events (read crime, cinema and cricket). There is no point in reinforcing this beration of the idiot box, but let us focus on the so-called ‘serious’ print media.
As a test case, Pragmatic examined the following newspapers – The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, DNA and The Hindu – for their coverage and analysis of India-Russia conference on defence matters. It was a significant event concerning India’s foreign policy and the Indian government actually pledged India’s future strategic interests to Russian armtwisting. This may emerge from an analysis of the deal making, but the coverage of the deal itself was incomplete and misleading.
To start with the pallbearer of levity, the TOI. It highlights extensive technical details of the FGFA (based more on guesswork and sourced from the internet) rather than cover any details of the deal. Interestingly, it harps on the joint development and goes on to add about the ‘landmark’ agreement -
Antony was quoted as saying that India and Russia would have equal financial and technological stakes in the FGFA project.
The Hindu, in its report from Moscow, also paints a rosier picture of the deals. The reportage, though factually correct, conveys a totally different picture from the actual.
Defence cooperation between India and Russia has taken a great leap forward with the signing of a multi-billion pact to build a futuristic combat aircraft…
“We will share the funding, engineering and intellectual property in a 50-50 proportion,” Mikhail Pogosyan said. He disclosed that the Indian version of the 5th-generation aircraft would be different from the Russian version because of specific Indian requirements.
The Hindustan Times has nothing of substance to offer in its report, other than banal generalities and clichés.
the Indian Air Force (IAF) can now hope to enhance its capabilities through the fifth generation fighters to be ‘developed and produced’ with the Russians.
The DNA is also very close to the HT in its coverage – bromides and commonplaces. The Indian Express had the best coverage among the print media surveyed for this post. The IE report tried to make some sense of the deal rather than indulge in hyperbole and other tropes.
The Sukhoi Aviation Holding Company (AHK) has won the Government tender to develop and manufacture Russia’s fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Sources said India was going to order a hundred such aircraft. The likely price of such a deal would be about $6 billion, although no real price has yet been fixed for India, nor is there agreement on who will own the intellectual property rights to the jointly developed aircraft. “These key questions will have to be addressed later,” sources said, pointing out that these fighters will be built in Russia and India, and New Delhi will have the right to supply them to third countries with Russian and the Russian-Indian models differing from each other.
The deals signed at Moscow are worth many times the high-profile flagship programmes of the Indian government. Besides the financial commitment, they pledge our strategic future to an unreliable and untrustworthy partner. A sensible debate on this topic of national importance is not too much to expect from an independent media in a 60-year old democracy. If this is the state of our ‘serious’ national media, we can only imagine the ‘informed’ coverage in the regional media. The media has a divine right to scrutinise and question everyone but who will kick the media so that the public is well and truly informed and their opinion au courant on matters of grave national importance.
Finally, are you an admirer of the Indian establishment’s ability to spin a yarn or lamenter of a gullible and credulous fourth estate? I belong to the latter.
What do you propose we do?
And why do you think the Hindu report “conveys a totally different picture from the actual”?
@Mihir:
What do you propose we do?
If we had entered a similar deal with the US after the US had reneged on its past commitments, what ought to be our course of action? Because we sign a nuke deal with the US and Russia sulks since we seem to be cosying up to the US, is not a good enough reason to pledge our future with an unreliable & aggressively profiteering Russia. This kind of balancing act is a sign of weakness and certainly not in the national interest.
The Russians are virtually holding us at gunpoint – by choking the supply of spares for the equipment supplied by them earlier. My bigger fear is what prevents Russians from indulging in similar blackmailing in the future. That is the question that needs an answer.
And why do you think the Hindu report “conveys a totally different picture from the actual”?
Haven’t you answered the question yourself? I got to change the text colour for ‘The Hindu’ to red.
Pragmatic>> If we had entered a similar deal with the US after the US had reneged on its past commitments, what ought to be our course of action?
So now the country that sent the USS Enterprise to browbeat India in 1971 and imposed sanctions on India in 1998 is just the same as Russia? The US is unreliable, period. With Russia, there is still hope.
Pragmatic>> Because we sign a nuke deal with the US and Russia sulks since we seem to be cosying up to the US, is not a good enough reason to pledge our future with an unreliable & aggressively profiteering Russia.
Between an extremely unreliable US and a Russia that might throw a fit or two from time to time, I choose Russia.
Pragmatic>> This kind of balancing act is a sign of weakness and certainly not in the national interest.
We ain’t got what it takes to walk it alone yet. India isn’t a part of the Big Boyz Club yet.
Pragmatic>> The Russians are virtually holding us at gunpoint – by choking the supply of spares for the equipment supplied by them earlier. My bigger fear is what prevents Russians from indulging in similar blackmailing in the future. That is the question that needs an answer.
We need solutions. Just throwing away our relationship with Russia isn’t one.
Pragmatic>> Haven’t you answered the question yourself? I got to change the text colour for ‘The Hindu’ to red.
No, I haven’t answered the question myself. The Hindu report states facts about the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft Deal. There are no lies there, and I don’t see any attempts to “paint a totally different picture” – not in the report, and not in the specific part you quoted.
And LiveFist is wrong – India sorely needed the Su-30 when the deal was signed. No country buys 230 aircraft as a political favour.
@Mihir:
Since we are not disputing facts, it is just a matter of what one believes is the right course of action. Between current day US and Russia, which is the lesser evil for India? We can’t let our past control the future. Russians are not honouring past agreements and bullying us in current deals. So it is not India but the Russians that are jettisoning a historical relationship. And more importantly, we are well past the Cold War era when it should be an either-or choice. India should do what is best for its interests – whether it be with US, Russia, Europe or China.
And LiveFist is wrong – India sorely needed the Su-30 when the deal was signed. No country buys 230 aircraft as a political favour.
No. Mr AB Vajpayee himself told so much to Shekhar Gupta in an interview. PM Narsimha Rao actually took all the opposition leaders into confidence and then signed the deal to help Yeltsin going into elections. other leaders have also confirmed it to Shekhar. It is public knowledge and recorded history.
Pragmatic>> Between current day US and Russia, which is the lesser evil for India? We can’t let our past control the future
Russia, any day of the week. The US has done nothing to indicate that it would be a reliable ally for India. The past is a good indicator of the future, and while we cannot let it control the future per se, it would be good to consider what Santayana said?
Pragmatic>>And more importantly, we are well past the Cold War era when it should be an either-or choice.
For India, strategic dependence is not even an either-or choice. No country is ready to give India what Russia is, be it nuclear tech, cryogenic engine tech, aerospace tech (from airframes to entire control systems for 3D TVC engines), submarine tech, or support in international fora. Losing out on these would set us back many years in critical strategic areas.
Pragmatic>> No. Mr AB Vajpayee himself told so much to Shekhar Gupta in an interview. PM Narsimha Rao actually took all the opposition leaders into confidence and then signed the deal to help Yeltsin going into elections. other leaders have also confirmed it to Shekhar. It is public knowledge and recorded history.
Even if what these politicians say is true, it does not change the fact that the IAF needed a major boost in the 1990s – a boost which only advanced aircraft like the Flanker could provide. According to a report submitted to the CAG in 1999, “Indian Air Force (IAF) combat aircraft consisted mainly those inducted into squadron service during mid seventies and early eighties. This was expected to deplete sharply from the year 1995 due to phasing out of obsolescent aircraft. As per projections made in the IAF Perspective Plan for 1992-2007, by the turn of the century, 19 per cent of the squadrons were to be phased out on completion of their useful technical life, besides becoming technologically obsolete. The combat fleet strength was expected to decline further upto 50 per cent by 2005, if no new acquisitions were made. The requirement of multi role combat aircraft was recognised and reflected in the IAF Perspective Plan for 1992-2007.” The aircraft considered were the Su-30K and Mirage-2000-V and the latter was the better contender by far. It is only when the Russians offered a far superior system (in terms of mission capability, life-cycle costs and fly-away cost) in the from of the Su-30MKI along with massive ToT did they bag the order. The timing *might* have been influenced by politics according to PVNR, but there is little to indicate that the deal itself was a political one.
BTW, how do I italicise text?
@Mihir:
We can agree to disagree, as it is a matter of reading the future. The facts are there for all to see. Really, neither of us can claim to be Nostradumus (and in may case, not even aspire to be one).
As you are much in know of these things, I am certain you would take these inputs to the CAG with a pinch of salt. If CAG raises a query, you gotcha justify that. If the choices were exercised the other way round, the ministry would have justified that as well.
Use basic html for italicising the text.
Yes, I will take inputs from CAG with a pinch of salt. I’m sure I’ll find some in the truckload of NaCl I will need to take with comments made by politicians (which can easily be misconstrued) to Shekhar Gupta (who is also a part of the “ignoramus Indian media”)
@Mihir:
These are not inputs from CAG but inputs to the CAG from the Defence ministry. It is up to you to take them or leave them.