Excuse me it was not pakistanis, it was your own Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has done something unprecedented. She is openly defaming her Ministry’s high-tech public sector undertaking Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for alleged technological incompetence. Please correct yourself
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is openly defaming her ministry’s high tech undertaking HAL, just to defend the choice of Anil Ambani’s company as offset partner in the Rafale fighter jet deal
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has done something unprecedented. She is openly defaming her Ministry’s high-tech public sector undertaking Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for alleged technological incompetence, just to defend the selection of Anil Ambani’s new company as the offset partner in the Rafale deal. What is shocking is that the Defence Minister
in her interaction with journalists in Delhi early this week remarked that the HAL did not have required capability to produce the Rafale fighter jets and later she observed that HAL and Dassault could not agree on production terms, so they could not go together. The responsibility of not concluding the agreement lay with the UPA government and not her government, she claimed.
The Defence Minister’s scathing attack on the capability of HAL has been immediately contested by the recently retired
Chairman of the PSU, T Suvarna Raju in his interview to a leading daily on Wednesday, September 20. He said “When HAL can build a 25 tonne Sukhoi 30 from raw material stage, then what are we talking about? We could have definitely done Rafale”.
Sitharaman was not the defence minister in April 2015 when the announcement about the Rafale deal was made as a part of the India-France inter governmental agreement in Paris by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Manohar Parrikar was the defence minister at the time. But still, as Parrikar’s successor, she has to project the developments correctly. In her eagerness to depict HAL in bad light, she has distorted the history of the actual developments that took place leading to the PM’s announcement of the Rafale deal and the subsequent exclusion of HAL on April 10, 2015. The developments show that HAL was supposed to be the collaborator until just two days before the PM’s announcement, as per the senior-most Indian officials, and there was no rift between the French company Dassault Aviation, makers of the Rafale jet, and HAL.
HAL is considered one of the top- ranking aero engineering and manufacturing companies in Asia and throughout its six decades of existence, this PSU has been continuously upgrading its technology and expertise to compete in the burgeoning global aerospace market. In 2017-18 financial year, HAL recorded a turnover of ₹18,519 crore and the company has a order book position of ₹61,123 crore as on March 31, 2018, despite a highly competitive market. India is likely to be the third largest aviation market in the world by 2025 and the country is forecasted to have a demand for a record 2,100 new aircraft worth US$ 290 billion.
