French experts also worried over Rafale misadventure

Three sentences by former French President Francois Hollande, quoted by French news portal Mediapart, have done Prime Minister Narendra Modi in. This is what Hollande (pronounced as ‘Olonde’) told Mediapart:

• He or his Government was not aware of Ambani or his company. The company was ‘imposed’ by the Indians.
• He or his Government had no choice in the matter.
• Ambani did not have to thank him (by investing in a film by Julie Gayet, Hollande’s partner at the time) for the deal because he played no part in it.

Hollande does say what the Modi Government and the French Government have been claiming, that once the new agreement was foisted on the French, the two companies Dassault and Reliance Defence and its subsidiaries worked out details of their collaboration.

But there is another important disclosure in the French report that Indian media have not caught on to yet. It says that during the previous UPA Government, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Dassault had agreed that not 108 but 70 Rafale jets would be manufactured in India while the remaining 56 of the 126 planes would be made in France and delivered to India, 38 more planes than the 18 mentioned in the initial agreement.

It was a win-win situation for both India and France. India would get the expertise and experience of manufacturing a technologically superior, fourth generation fighting machine while Dassault and France would also get to manufacture and supply more planes in fly-away condition than was initially agreed.

In the event, the Modi Government foisted a new agreement, which allowed Dassault to deliver 36 planes, not 56 it had bargained for, but HAL was given the short-shrift while Anil Ambani’s two-week old company sneaked in from the backdoor.

French defence expert: Dassault running “a huge industrial risk” by partnering with an Indian company with no experience

Even more significantly, the Mediapart report quotes an unnamed French defence expert saying that Dassault was running “a huge industrial risk” by partnering with an Indian company with no experience of even manufacturing a screw for the Rafale, as Anil Ambani has admitted himself.

While the cryptic comment has again gone unnoticed, the expert hints at the possible ‘incapacity’ to absorb high technology. If he had ‘security breaches’ in mind, the report does not explicitly say so. But what is clear is that even French security experts are worried over what they see as a misadventure.

The logic and the compulsion of the Modi Government are still not clear. And the #Hollandebombshell, the hash tag trending on Twitter, would strengthen the demand made by the Congress and the Congress President that an inquiry by the Joint Parliamentary Committee is needed.