Turbulence Ahead

Gp Capt AK Sachdev (Retd)

A few weeks ago, at a seminar organised by Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS), the Vice Chief of Air Staff Air Marshal A.P. Singh opined to the audience that aatmanirbharta cannot be achieved at the cost of India’s national security, and pointed out that geopolitics had thrown up a lesson of being self-reliant which ought to be pursued holistically in letter and spirit.

The Air Marshal has since taken over as the Chief of Air Staff (CAS) and his utterances are significant, coming as they do against the backdrop of Chinese belligerence in the north/north-east and Pakistani machinations in the West. War preparedness should be a paramount national security consideration at the moment, but it is becoming apparent that as the tug of war between defence needs (for warfighting) and political wants (aatmanirbhar sloganeering) gains intensity, the former may be losing ground. This article looks at the IAF’s critical need for modern aircraft, the lack of indigenous, aatmanirbhar aircraft to gratify that need, and the resultant unremitting decline in the IAF’s capability.

Aatmanirbhar: Cart Before the Horse?

On 12 May 2020 Modi launched the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan. Since then, his visible and audible personal crusade for Aatmanirbhar has had the effect of an eager to please bureaucracy towing the line and reacting to the pressure by producing figures that have the right optics but lack real substance. Five Positive Indigenous Lists have been promulgated by the ministry of defence (MoD) to conjure up an apparition of huge and continual progress in indigenisation.

The five lists have 2,851, 107, 780, 928 and 346 items listed. However, their facetiousness is evident to any incisive reader caring to visit that page on the MoD website. The page displays the first list of 2,500 items which have been ‘indigenised’ (and another list of 351 items which would be procured only from Indian industry after time periods which are stipulated in the list). A closer look at the indigenised list reveals that a huge proportion of the items are mundane and belong to the domain of the micro industry segment. Of these, the indigenisation of 1,837 items is attributed to HAL, raising the question as to why a navaratna company which has parasitically devoured enormous amount of public money ever since its management passed on to an independent Indian government (i.e. the public) was being tasked to produce commonplace items like nuts, bolts, bushes, screws and so on. More important is the question as to why were we waiting all these years to indigenise these nuts and bolts? Somebody had gone to great trouble to stretch the list to the smooth and round figure of 2,500; the clever itemiser has listed more than 70 types of screws as uniquely numbered items!

The Negative Import Lists represent another similar self-adulation exercise. Many of the items on these lists are already being produced in India—naval warships, towed artillery guns, Multi Barrel Rocket Launchers (MBRLS) and towed artillery guns, just to name some of them. A cursory look at the defence export items also shows that albeit the total export sales having gone up and the current statistics show high figures (in contrast to the starting point which was abysmally low), major pieces of equipment are not visible in India’s repertoire. There is also the easily overlooked nuance that some equipment being ‘produced’ in India lacks indigenous technological base and is either entirely or majorly dependent haplessly on foreign knowhow. Nonetheless, these products are touted as examples of self-reliance, or aatmanirbhar if you will, thus adding to the subterfuge.

As a result, in aerospace a