After the proposed deal for 26 Rafale-Marine fighters found no mention in the joint documents issued after the Modi-Macron summit in Paris on Friday, the reference to the MoU inked for the construction of three more Scorpene submarines in India was also dropped from a later version of the bilateral statement issued on Saturday morning.
An official government source on Saturday claimed ‘some earlier negotiating text got uploaded’ on the external affairs ministry’s website ‘for a short while’ and that it was ‘not the agreed upon text in any way’. The approved text now on the website is the same one as published by the French government, he added.
Both the proposed Rafale-M and Scorpene procurements, which were cleared by the defence ministry on Thursday and will together cost an estimated Rs 80,000 crore (almost 9 billion euros), of course, are still far away from being inked, as was reported earlier by TOI.
With the actual contracts to be signed only after protracted techno-commercial negotiations and then the final nod from the Cabinet Committee on Security, which could take well over a year, the government probably does not want to give the opposition any opportunity to rake up controversy in the run-up to the general elections early next year. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had undertaken a strident campaign against the earlier Rs 59,000 crore contract for the 36 Rafales for the IAF in September 2016, though the government dismissed all allegations of corruption.
The Horizon 2047 document on Friday night had said India and France ‘welcome the MoU between Mazagon Dockyard Ltd and (French) Naval Group for the construction of three additional submarines under the P-75 programme’.
As for the joint development of a combat aircraft engine, the document said, ‘A roadmap on this project will be prepared between Safran and DRDO before the end of this year’. But these lines went missing from the later version of the document.
This came after foreign secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra, on being specifically asked about the proposed deal for 26 Rafale-M jets not finding mention in the documents late on Friday night in Paris, said the Horizon 2047 document looks at the bilateral defence and security partnership ‘from a more holistic and comprehensive manner rather than as a set of individual transactions or procurements’
‘The reason for that is because the metrics of defence partnership are not defined by a single acquisition or a non-acquisition, single procurement or a single transaction,’ he said.
Incidentally, in a press statement issued on Friday, Rafale-manufacturer Dassault Aviation said the ‘Indian government announced the selection of the Navy Rafale to equip the Indian Navy with a latest-generation fighter’ after ‘an international competition’.
