NEW DELHI: India's future purchase of Rafale fighter jets will only come through direct talks with the French government, the defence minister has said, effectively killing talks on one of the world's largest aviation deals.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last week that New Delhi had ordered 36 Rafale fighter jets from France in a multi-billion-dollar agreement that has been years in the making.
But Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said late on Monday that any future deals will be negotiated directly between the two governments, rather than between the manufacturer and Indian bureaucrats.
“All deal(s) will be in G2G only,” Parrikar told reporters in New Delhi, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
“The reason we have taken 36 directly is to ensure that they are inducted into the air force at the earliest,” he also told the IBN 7 network.
Read: Modi orders 36 'ready-to-fly' French-made Rafale fighter jets
The minister said the original negotiations to buy 126 Rafale jets from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation — that have been dragging since 2012 — had gone into a “vortex” or a “loop”, with no solution in sight.
“The process is stalled. It has hit a wall and is not getting [any] result,” he told IBN 7.
But he stopped short of saying the government had scrapped talks altogether on the deal, which was originally estimated at $12 billion and had now reportedly ballooned to $20 billion.
“Instead of going through the Request for Proposal (RFP) route where there was (a) lot of confusion and chaos, it was decided that we will go through the G2G route,” he said.
“It should have never gone through an RFP. [The] earlier government should have taken the decision to work on a government to government deal,” he said.
Tortuous negotiations
Dassault won the right in January 2012 to enter exclusive negotiations with India to supply 126 Rafale fighters under the previous Congress-led government. But the deal has been bogged down in torturous negotiations over cost and guarantee over assembly of the planes in India.
The original deal was for Dassault to supply 18 of the twin-engine fighters, while the remaining 108 would be made by state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd under technology transfer agreements with India.
Defence analyst Rahul Bedi said current talks between Dassault and India to supply the rest of the Rafales were now dead, but he did not rule out future deals.
Bedi said it “makes no logistic, economic or common sense” for India to just purchase 36 Rafales when the airforce desperately needed many more jets to replace its ageing fleet.
“The [current] negotiations hit such a roadblock that the only option was to walk away from the deal,” Bedi, from IHS Jane's Defence Weekly, told AFP.
Modi announced the 36 jets had been ordered after talks with French President Francois Hollande on a visit to France, the first leg of his maiden trip to Europe.
India has launched a vast defence modernisation programme worth some $100 billion, in part to keep up with rival neighbours Pakistan and China.
Sameer Patil, defence analyst at Gateway House think tank based in Mumbai, said government to government talks were “less cumbersome than commercial bidding”.
