Flight Response
These are tough times for the Indian Air Force. Over the past year, the IAF has been stretched thin due to a border crisis in Ladakh. In order “to conserve flying hours and equipment,” it recently cancelled its showpiece training exercise Iron Fist, which is supposed to be held every three years. The need to conserve came because its fleet only has around thirty squadrons of fighter jets against the 42 authorised by the government. More importantly, it is in desperate need of a qualitative upgrade. After the embarrassing outcome of the limited aerial skirmish over Jammu and Kashmir skies during the 2019 Balakot crisis, an upgrade would at least restore the IAF’s technological superiority over its Pakistani counterpart. The IAF seems to consider the induction of 36 French Rafale fighter aircraft as the panacea for all its ills.
The three-part investigation into the Rafale deal by the French news portal could not have come at a more inopportune time for the IAF top brass at Vayu Bhawan. The IAF as an institution has been perceived as enthusiastically batting for Dassault, the manufacturer of the Rafale aircraft, since the end of the 1999 Kargil War. The support has been loud and vociferous—at times, embarrassingly so—especially after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the sudden announcement, in 2015, that India would buy only 36 Rafale jets and scrap ongoing negotiations for 126 jets. After serious allegations of wrongdoing in the deal were made by and , senior IAF officials came out on news television to give a
