India’s Chief of Defense Staff General Bipin Rawat, in an exclusive interview to Times of India, insisted that India must stop buying and depending on foreign-made weapons and instead start manufacturing its own. Rawat was echoing his Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet slogan: “Make in India” and trying to make it come true.
Bipin Rawat’s comment that: “We are not expeditionary forces that have to deploy around the globe. So, we should not go in for large amounts of imports by misrepresenting our operational requirements” is a reality check. However, his opinion runs contrary to his own Defence Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, who is on record to have earlier stated that the army was free to buy defence equipment from anywhere in the world. The honourable Indian Defence Minister stressed that she can’t “force the forces” to buy only “Made in India” equipment. While it would be nice if that were to happen, the armed forces were at liberty to pick and choose the equipment they need from anywhere in the world.
India, like the rest of the world, is dealing with the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, gross financial mismanagement aggravated besides the onset of the pandemic COVID-19 is sending India to the brink of a major fiscal catastrophe. Indian economic analyst and former central banker like RK Pattnaik, in his opinion piece titled ‘A fiscal collapse is in the offing for India’ published in The Hindu of May 11, 2020, expresses a grim scenario. The analyst apprises that in a surprise move, the Government of India (GoI) in consultation with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has enhanced the magnitude of its gross market borrowing programme to ?12 lakh crore for fiscal 2021, an increase of 54 per cent over the budgeted market borrowings of the same year. The announcement came on in an RBI press release issued on May 8. It may be mentioned that the market was expecting some slippages, but not of such a magnitude.
Acquiring new equipment has been a point of contention for the defence sector because Indian Armed Forces currently prefer to import rather than acquire indigenous weapon systems
The informed financial expert believes that according to the claims of the authorities, the revision was necessitated, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. The erudite former central banker opines that the impact of such an upward revision has many repercussions, even accounting for the unusual situation caused by the pandemic and the resultant and expected toll on fiscal prudence in terms of the FRBM deficit and debt targets. This is over and above the agreement reached by mutual consultation that the Ways and Means Advances (WMA) to the Union government, which is ideally meant to meet the sudden and unexpected increase cash deficit of the government, be substantially revised earlier to ?1,20,000 crore, a jump of 60 per cent. He concludes that the situation which will unfold in the near future in the post-COVID 19 world is a complete collapse of the Indian economy in terms of growth and livelihoods.
Besides Pattnaik, numerous international financial experts and India watchers like Harrison Schwartz in their opinion pieces are informing that spread of COVID into India has caused the country’s currency and equity market to crash. Efforts to stop the virus’s spread have generally failed and unemployment has skyrocketed to around 27%.
In this grim milieu, Bipin Rawat’s insistence that India must stop buying and depending on foreign-made weapons and instead start manufacturing its own is a sense of pragmatism. However, the bitter truth is that the indigenous Indian Defence Industry is also a disaster. Acquiring new equipment has been a point of contention for the defence sector because Indian Armed Forces currently prefer to import rather than acquire indigenous weapon systems. The technology produced in India is not considered up to the mark and superior versions are available off-the-shelf from foreign suppliers despite the empty coffers.
India’s military research branch-the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO)-also discourages private participation, claiming that they have superior expertise and should get priority in the strategic sector. This claim is not supported by ground realities like its major faux pas the Arjun tank, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas, which became obsolete even before its induction, INSAS rifle, Saras, Kaveri, Akash, Nag and Indra Radar.
Despite its shortcomings, according to the World Bank, India is the fourth largest military spending power in the world. Rawat has declared that India has to support its domestic defense industrial base even if the produced weapons perform at “reduced technical specifications” or GSQRs (general staff qualitative requirements).
The truth is that “Make in India” is a dead proposition. India is bending backwards to acquire the bribery scandal tainted French Rafale fighter jets and the Russian Triumf S-400 missile systems, especially after its air force faced a debacle in its clash with Pakistan Air Force on February 27 in the aftermath of its failed surgical strike at Balakot.
The question remains, that with an imminent financial meltdown, how will India afford fresh defence acquisitions?
The writer is a retired Group Captain of PAF. He is a columnist, analyst and TV talk show host, who has authored six books on current affairs, including three on China