The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a review petition questioning the clean chit to the government on the 2016 acquisition of 36 Rafale fighter jets from France

by Sandeep Unnithan

Upholding its December 14, 2018 verdict, a three-judge bench headed by outgoing Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said it was satisfied with the procurement process and asserted that the price and decision-making procedure were not in doubt. The court refused to interfere with executive decisions when it said that it was not competent to judge several issues in the case. It would not partake in what it called 'a fishing and roving expedition'.

The review petition was filed by former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan in light of fresh evidence that the government had not divulged to the apex court all the facts in the case. The petitioners had also asked for the CBI to register a preliminary inquiry into the 2016 Rafale deal, worth Rs 59,000 crore for the Indian Air Force. The court rejected their appeal.

These petitions, filed last year, were distinct from the opposition Congress party's attack on the government on the Rafale purchase. As election fever gripped the country, the party, seeing a huge political opportunity in the Rafale controversy, had embarked on an incendiary campaign. Fronted by Rahul Gandhi, it had called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a thief, the CEO of the French fighter jet maker a liar, dragged a former head of state, Francois Hollande, and even a grievously ill former defence minister, the late Manohar Parrikar, into the controversy. But the campaign failed. The BJP returned to power with an even larger number of seats.

As with defence procurement scandals in India, it may take years to assess the actual damage from the Rafale deal. This is because of what the controversy actually targets-the minds of the bureaucrats that sign procurement files.

Indian defence procurement cases are notoriously complex, process-driven rather than outcome-oriented. Procurement cases routinely take up to a decade to fructify. A mere whiff of a scandal results in the whole process either being scrapped or going into a limbo. Too-hot-to-handle files are put 'into orbit', slang for deliberately delayed.

A key MoD official recently refused to move a controversial acquisition case. "I don't want to be doing the rounds of a court a decade after my retirement," he reportedly told officials. It echoed a former defence bureaucrat's comment when he explained how, after Bofors, a common refrain in the bureaucracy was that "no one wanted to be a Bhatnagar". S.K. Bhatnagar, defence secretary during the acquisition of the Bofors howitzers in 1986, was one of the first persons to be questioned by the CBI after it registered an FIR in the bribery case in 1990. He spent years under a cloud before passing away in 2001.

Allegations of bribes paid by West German submarine maker HDW in the mid-1980s, wrecked the navy's plans to build submarines indigenously. The Bofors controversy stalled the Indian army's artillery acquisitions. No new howitzers were purchased during the decade-long tenure of the Manmohan Singh government between 2004 and 2014. The first new howitzers were delivered only last year, in 2018, nearly three decades after the Bofors buy.

The Rafale was selected as the outcome of the IAF's decade-old quest to buy 126 modern fighter jets. The procurement was deadlocked by 2015. The government seized the opportunity cost- it scrapped the earlier contract and bought only 36 fighter jets as an emergency procurement directly from the French government. The petitioners' case against the procurement was built on examining what they saw as the deviations in the procurement and imputing motives to each one of them. These included the unfounded allegation that businessman Anil Ambani was set to corner a lion's share of the defence offsets from the deal.

The Indian armed forces are set to import arms worth over $100 billion over the next decade. It's anyone's guess if the bureaucratic effort to acquire them will be process-oriented or result driven.

The point here is--political parties, irrespective of affiliation, encash the chips from controversies when it suits them. In 2016, the NDA government blacklisted all firms associated with tainted Italian conglomerate Finmeccanicca (now called Leonardo) because its helicopter division AgustaWestland allegedly bribed Indian officials and politicians in a 2010 deal for 12 VVIP helicopters. One of these subsidiary companies had been short-listed to equip Indian submarines with advanced torpedoes. Five years later, the navy's submarines are still sailing without the advanced torpedoes. At the very least, these procurement scandals might have the unintended benefits of making indigenous options far more attractive.