French Minister Lecornu to board INS Vikrant on November 27 off Mumbai

While maritime version of French Rafale fighter is in contention of the 26 fighter contract for aircraft carrier INS Vikrant, the last of the 36 contracted Rafale fighters will land at Jamnagar air base on December 13.

Updated on: Nov 23, 2022, 09:07:04 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu will go onboard aircraft carrier INS Vikrant off the coast of Mumbai on November 27 even as the last of the contracted 36 Rafale fighter will land at Jamnagar air base in India from France on December 13 with the help of UAE mid-air refueler.

PM Narendra Modi aboard INS Vikrant on September 2, 2022

Minister Lecornu will be on a two day visit to intensify bilateral defence ties and is scheduled to meet his Indian counterpart Rajnath Singh on November 28 for talks and is expected to call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, his on-board visit to INS Vikrant, the indigenous aircraft carrier, which was commissioned by PM Modi on September 2, 2022, is significant as French Rafale-M is one of the two contenders for the floating airfield. The other contender for the 26 maritime strike fighters for INS Vikrant is US Boeing manufactured F-18 fighter.

French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu greets visiting Indian Army Chief Gen Manoj Pandey at Arc de Triomphe ceremony on November 16

India’s other aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya is expected to come out of major overhaul by next month with scheduled sea trials and aircraft landings planned off the coast of Karwar immediately after.

While Minister Lecornu went out of his way and protocol to attend the kindling ceremony at Arc de Triomphe in Paris with visiting Army Chief General Manoj Pande on November 16, the French Defence Minister has been directed by President Macron to extend all defence cooperation to PM Modi’s “Aatmanirbhar Bharat” campaign. PM Modi and President Macron had a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the recently concluded G-20 summit with both countries prepared to join hands from seabed to space. President Macron’s diplomatic advisor Emmanuel Bonne is expected to be in India in January 2023 for the strategic dialogue with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

In between the visits of Minister Lecornu and Diplomatic Advisor Bonne, France will be dispatch the last of the Rafale fighter jet to India on December 13. The fighter will be refueled by UAE’s Airbus 330 refueler over Indian Ocean. Although this fighter (sign RB 001) was the first one built by Dassault under the 36 aircraft contract, the aircraft was re-fitted with the new engines and parts as it had been extensively used by the IAF to train its pilots on Rafale fighters in France. This aircraft is fitted with all India specific enhancements and will join the Rafale squadrons based in Ambala in Haryana and Hashimara in West Bengal. With this the French Dassault will complete the deliveries of all the 36 fighters for India.

India and France have deep defence ties for the past decades with the latter now willing to jointly design, develop and manufacture aircraft engines and long range attack submarines in India for strengthening its defence as well as allowing it to export to third friendly countries.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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