Let’s, for a moment, take the NDA’s latest charge against the UPA government at face value. The Government of India placed an order for six Scorpene class submarines with French companies DCN and Thales in October 2005. According to the deal, the submarines will be built at the Mazgaon dockyard in Mumbai with technical assistance and equipment from the two French companies and will be ready for delivery between 2012 and 2017. Contractual terms, state the NDA, were violated and middlemen and kickbacks were allowed to run amok by the government. In the process, not only do we have a ‘Bofors redux’ — or in the words of L.K. Advani, something “bigger than Bofors” — but also navy secrets inimical to our national security have been leaked. If all this is what the NDA tells us it is, then there’s little reason why anyone should disagree that the Scorpene deal should be scrapped and investigations be ordered right away to get to the bottom of the ‘scam’.
Except, the NDA seems to have got it all wrong — or, as is more likely, tried to cook up a nice little storm in a tea cup. Our reasons to suspect the validity of the allegation are four-fold. First, it was the NDA that had completed negotiations for the Scorpene deal in 2002, unable to see the deal through to the end because of general elections and its aftermath coming in the way. Two, the deal, as signed by the UPA government, was governed by an ‘integrity pact’, making it mandatory for any contract over Rs 300 crore — as the Scorpene contract was — to be off if there was any ‘commissions’ (read: kickbacks). Three, the present government managed to reduce the price tag negotiated by its predecessor by Rs 313 crore — in effect, eating into any shadowy ‘middleman money’ if there was any. Four, the identification of the ‘middleman’ in the Outlook report — from which the NDA has based its whole thesis — is far too pat, considering that the alleged ‘middleman’s reputation as a ‘fixer’ in arms deals is fairly well established.
But can one blame the poor NDA for trying to make a mountain out of submarines? When the going gets desperate, the desperate get going. And if there’s an arms deal with a Congress-led government at the Centre, it never hurt the NDA to give us a song and dance.