‘NDA’s Rafale controversy is like a déjà vu of Congress’s Bofors’

Security challenges to India have been regular. Whether it is China or Pakistan, we have complex security challenges along with equally complex challenges on the domestic fronts as well

Pune: Amidst the ongoing blame game between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress on the Rafale deal, Commodore Uday Bhaskar (retd), director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi drew comparisons between the latest defence deal with France, with the Bofors scam of 1987.

Udhay Bhaskar,retired commodre, speaks during a lecture at Military Intelligence Training school in Pune. (Shankar Narayan/HT PHOTO)

Delivering the Air Marshal YV Malse memorial lecture on ‘India’s Military Security Challenges over the Next Decade’ at the Centre for Advanced Strategic Studies (CASS), Pune, Bhaskar said the BJP government was dithering in its response to the Rafale allegations.

“The Rafale controversy is like a déjà vu of the Congress-led government’s Bofors scam. The entire nation is in a feeling of having already experienced the present situation. Also, it is indeed a surprising state where the serving Air Force chief officers came out in the public defending the government and the cost of the deal,” he said.

India had inked an inter-governmental agreement with France in September last year for procurement of 36 Rafale fighter jets at a cost of around ₹58,000 crore, nearly one-and-a-half years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the proposal during a visit to Paris. The delivery of the jets is scheduled to begin from September 2019.

Bhaskar blamed successive governments of failing to provide enough resources to the Indian Army. “If we have to deal with the turbulent situation in the state of Jammu and Kashmir or in the northeast, it is indispensable to have boots on the ground. However, to achieve this, the government must spend at least 60 per cent of the budget on the military,” he said.

The ministry of defence, year after year, has been unable to spend the entire allocation in the budget, he said. He also held that the establishments at the Centre were inadequately prepared to deal with the challenges, both tactically and strategically.

“Security challenges to India have been regular. Whether it is China or Pakistan, we have complex security challenges along with equally complex challenges on the domestic fronts as well. However, the Indian governments have been inadequate in terms of anticipating the challenges,” he said.