Any future Indian purchase of Rafale fighter jets will only come about through direct negotiations with the French government, the defence minister has said, effectively killing off talks about a massive deal. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced last week that New Delhi had ordered 36 of the planes 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. The minister said the original negotiations to buy 126 Rafale jets from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation - that have been dragging on 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 has 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. In France, President Francois Hollande said, "we had to move very quickly for the 36" jets ordered last week.
"For the rest, this is up for debate with our partner," added the president, stressing that Delhi "had confidence" in Paris.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, for his part, put the ball squarely in Delhi's court.