AUG. 2015
Maharashtra
government
allots 289 acres
in MIHAN
SEZ, Nagpur,
to Reliance
AerostructureJUL. 2015
Defence
minister
Mano har
Parrikar
announces the
126 MMRCA
deal’s scrapped
DEC. 2015
Reliance Entertainment invests ¤1.6 million
in a movie co-produced by Hollande’s
partner Julie Gayet. Mediapart says the
investment was made by an investment
fund of a Frenchman who has known Anil
Ambani for 25 yearsworks out to Rs 1,671 crore per air-
craft, going by the figures in the 2016
company report of Dassault Aviation.
This, the Congress says, amounts to an
almost 300 per cent escalation in the
price of the deal.T
he NDA says it paid Rs 670
crore for the Rafales, though
this price was, as MoS for de-
fence Subhash Bhamre told
the Lok Sabha on November 18, 2016,
minus the ‘associated equipment, wea-
pons, India-specific enhancements,
maintenance support and services’.
The Congress alleges their price (for a
deal that wasn’t signed) included these
India-specific enhancements,
maintena nce support and services.
The government is unwilling to dis-
close the fully-loaded price of the jets,
citing national security concerns as
finance minister Arun Jaitley re-em-
phasised in a September 23 interview
to news agency ANI. “If you take a
weaponised aircraft as of 2007, add
the same two things to it again and
bring it to the 2016 level, it is 20 per
cent cheaper,” he said. This is an issue
the CAG is going through, Jaitley
pointed out—adding, perhaps more
prophetically than he realised, “the
truth will come out”.WERE STANDARD PROCEDURES
OVERLOOKED IN THE DEAL?
The Rafale purchase came as a bolt
from the blue when it was proposedby Prime Minister Modi in Paris on
April 10, 2015. Very few people knew
it was coming and top Dassault offi-
cials claim even President Hollande
was surprised by the Indian PM’s offer
of a government to government deal.
“France never does G2G deals and
does not have a Foreign Military Sales
route like the US has,” says a Dassault
official. It took France three months to
set up a team headed by an Air Mar-
shal from the Directorate General of
Armame nts (DGA), the government
body that procures armaments for
France’s military.
Meanwhile, in India, the Congress
has charged the PM with violating
the Defence Procurement Procedure
(DPP) by bypassing the mandatory
prior approval of the Cabinet Commit-
tee on Security (CCS) before announc-
ing the purchase of the aircraft. The
mandatory Price Negotiation Com-
mittee and CNC were also dispensed
with. The government’s defence has
been to stick to the argument that the
joint statement in Paris on April 10
wa s only an ex pression of interest and
not a formal signing of contract. The
Defence Acquisition Council (DAC)
approval was taken on May 13, 2015,
over a month after the joint statement.
The government could be on shaky
ground here. There is still no clarity
on how the government arrived at the
figure of 36 aircraft or whether the
IAF was consulted before arriving at
this figure.