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Aim before you shoot
India has been a major importer of weapons, ordering arms worth $ 15.7 billion just between 1997 and 2004. That accounted for 10.3 per cent of all arms purchases by the developing world.
India has been a major importer of weapons, ordering arms worth $ 15.7 billion just between 1997 and 2004. That accounted for 10.3 per cent of all arms purchases by the developing world. It has now emerged as the world's largest arms importer since 2004. It signed $ 5.7 billion in new arms deals in 2004, and nearly $ 6 billion last year. This year could register an all-time record if India signs a deal to buy 126 multi-role combat aircraft, worth more than $ 6.5 billion.
The latest $ 3.4 billion mega deal to acquire six Franco-Spanish Scorpene diesel submarines has brought with it not only allegations of kickbacks but also French gratitude — disparagement of Mittal Steel's bid for rival Arcelor as a corporate clash of civilisations, and an asbestos-laden aircraft carrier that was grudgingly called back from its dismantlement voyage so President Jacques Chirac could seek more mega-deals during his India visit from Sunday.
India is becoming such a big market for foreign arms makers that 400 companies from 38 nations hawked their wares at a New Delhi defence exhibition earlier this month. Many such firms have set up shop in the capital as they discern arms-sale opportunities worth $ 15 billion to $ 18 billion in the next three years alone. The city now swarms with foreign arms merchants and their middlemen, with some firms engaging politicians, strategic analysts, former military officers and ex-bureaucrats as consultants.
Far from making the nation stronger, the large arms imports underscore the manner India is depleting its meagre defence resources and eroding its conventional-military edge. The Indian military today can achieve many missions, including repulsing an aggression and inflicting substantial losses on the invaders. It can even carry out limited pre-emptive or punitive action and fend off counteraction. But it cannot do what any major military should be trained and equipped for — decisively win a war against an aggressor State.
The reason is not hard to seek: modernisation outlays mainly go not to develop the country's own armament-production base but to subsidise the military industrial complex of others through import of weapons, some of questionable value. India's heavy dependence on arms imports and slow, cumbersome procurement process are antithetical to the building of a cutting-edge military. Procurement mirrors the single-service, set-piece style and not the 21st-century need for integration, agility, flexibility, precision, and massing and synergy effects. None of the mega-deals India has signed in recent years will arm its military with the leading edge it needs in an increasingly volatile and uncertain security environment.
While arms makers earlier would sell a system to India before they sold it to a regional rival (like the Sukhoi-30s, later given to China), now they come hawking the very wares they have already marketed in adversarial Pakistan (like the F-16s, C-130s and P3C Orions). Scorpene, although developed a decade later, shares its internal systems with the improved Agosta 90B which Pakistan has. It is as if India wants to fight the next war only to a stalemate.
India pays through its nose for weapons the militaries of the exporting States don't value anymore. Yet, India naively equates a State's arms sales to it as strategic 'cooperation' or 'partnership'. There is no reflection on why, despite its world-power pretensions, it remains the only large-size country to import most of its conventional weaponry. Nor is there embarrassment that it is buying billions of dollars worth of arms from a nation whose population is just half of Delhi's — Israel.
Now, the strong arms-import lobby in town is being supplemented by a new energy-import lobby, as India seeks to replicate in the energy sector the very mistake it has pursued on armaments. Out of the blue, new proponents of commercial nuclear power have sprung up in town. Nuclear power, which was unappealing until it was an all-Indian enterprise, is now sexy, touted as panacea to India's energy needs. Yet the beguiling nuclear deal with the US comes with few tangible energy benefits but high strategic costs.
The global nuclear reactor and fuel business, controlled by a tiny cartel of State-guided firms, is the most politically regulated commerce in the world, with no sanctity of contract, as India found out bitterly on Tarapur. But with India seemingly loath to heed any lesson from the past, America's General Electric, France's Areva Group and Framatome ANP, and Russia's Atomstroyexport (ASE) already sense the billions of dollars that await them in Indian contracts.
Why would India think of compounding its arms blunder by seeking to import overly expensive reactors when it can more profitably invest in the development of its own energy sources? The economics of imported nuclear power, in any case, makes no sense. Indeed, India has a more advanced nuclear power industry than the US, where federal funding for improved reactors was cut off long ago and all reactors ordered after 1973 have been cancelled.
With recent efforts to build new reactors in the US stalling in the face of the familiar hurdle — higher capital costs compared to thermal plants — Washington sees sales to India as the best way to resuscitate its moribund industry. However, at the current cost of $ 1.35 million per installed megawatt capacity, the Indian reactor is almost 25 per cent cheaper than the average price of Western reactor bids in China. Yet, Manmohan Singh, who as finance minister starved the indigenous nuclear power industry of necessary funds for expansion, suddenly saw such virtue in importing reactors that he rushed into a deal the US had designed to rake up large commercial profits as well as to cap India's most successful strategic programme.
One hopes the PM has become wiser with events. A single 1,000-megawatt imported reactor will cost 2.4 times the present annual budget of the entire Indian nuclear power industry. One also hopes he will start correcting the imports-driven defence priorities. The government provides a paltry $ 160 million for missile development, production and infrastructure and $ 425 million for nuclear research and development annually, but is paying, for example, $1.8 billion to Britain for 66 already-obsolescent Hawk jet trainers.
Clearly, the interests of the arms- and energy-import lobbies converge on the nuclear deal. It is not an accident that as the deal has begun to unravel, a coordinated media campaign has been let loose against the Indian atomic establishment. A threat to the deal threatens the billions of dollars at stake. As the Washington Post front-paged last July 19, quoting Pentagon officials, India has promised to buy "as much as $ 5 billion" worth of US arms once the deal is implemented. Potential reactor sales would be worth more.
If there is anything enlightening about the PM's jingly new brainchild, "enlightened national interest", it is that the government should cease being non-aligned with national interests. Contrast the squandering of huge resources on arms imports with the neglect of India's own capabilities. What was to be a credible minimal deterrent has become a minimal credible deterrent where credibility is at a minimum.
Nothing better illustrates this than the February 3 statement of the DRDO chief that the Agni-3 is ready for test-launch but that he still awaits the political go-ahead. In which other country do scientists confront a political hold-up of a missile test or are compelled to blow the whistle on the shadowy pressures over a nuclear deal? Is this how our enlightened PM would like to be remembered — a hawk on Iran but a wimp on India's own capabilities?
