India kills $20-B defense deal

WITH Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s big announcement in Paris that New Delhi would purchase 36 Dassault Rafale multi-role fighters off-the-shelf (prêt-à-porter, if you will) in a government-to-government deal, the future of the $20 billion tender for India’s medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) that was being negotiated between France’s Dassault Aviation and the Indian government fell into limbo. That ambiguity was resolved on Monday, three days after Modi’s announcement, when Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar clarified that the $20 billion tender would not move forward. Just like that, the “mother of all defense deals,” as India’s MMRCA project was known, was dead.

Though Parrikar avoided shutting the door on the project entirely, he emphasized that the Indian government would not move forward with those negotiations for the moment, suggesting that if New Delhi does purchase additional Rafales, it will do so in another government-to-government deal. His ministry’s official spokesperson, Sitanshu Kar, tweeted that the “[government-to-government] route [is] better than the [request for proposal] path for acquisition of strategic platforms.”