India to seek weaponisation of 22 Guardian drones during Tillerson’s visit

US secretary of state Rex Tillerson will arrive on October 24, and will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and NSA Ajit Doval.

Updated on: Oct 24, 2017, 11:13:54 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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India plans to discuss weaponisation of the Guardian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with US secretary of state Rex Tillerson on October 25, during his visit to New Delhi as part of a five-nation tour of the subcontinent.

US secretary of state Rex Tillerson will arrive in India on October 24. (REUTERS)

The US had formally submitted its “pricing and availability” proposal for the sale of 22 Guardian UAVs to India before defence secretary James Mattis’ visit last month. India hopes to use the high-altitude long-endurance drone to protect its 7,000-km-long coastline from potential infiltrators.

Tillerson is slated to arrive in New Delhi on Tuesday evening after flying from Pakistan. He will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and national security advisor Ajit Doval the next day.

Diplomatic sources in New Delhi and Washington told HT that Tillerson will review bilateral ties, besides focusing on terrorism emanating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, bilateral synergy in the Indo-Pacific zone and security concerns over North Korea.

While New Delhi remained tight-lipped on the defence acquisition, senior officials said the 22 UAVs – priced at around $3 billion – would be more cost-effective if they were weaponised.

The weaponised version of the Guardian is called the Sea Avenger, and it comes with a top-of-the-line synthetic aperture radar and an electro-optical targeting system for firing Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs.

Tillerson and Doval are expected to discuss several global issues, including the North Korean nuclear threat; terrorism in Pakistan; Qatar-Saudi Arabia discord; Indo-Pacific enhanced bilateral naval cooperation; and the future of the Islamic State.

The two sides will firm up their commitment to reconstructing and stabilising Afghanistan, and look at ways to bring the Taliban (minus Pakistan support) to the negotiating table. India will also urge Tillerson to put pressure on Pakistan to act against terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

“We are looking forward to Tillerson’s visit, and plan to take our bilateral relationship on the path defined by him in his speech at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies on October 18,” said a senior South Block official.

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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