Abingdonboy
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To be fair sir, the Brazil examine is pretty irrelevant in this case. India is not Brazil and vice versa. The procurement in Brazil turned VERY political and the selection process seemed to be constantly changing the goal posts and different frontrunner for always fluctuating, The MMRCA selection had next to no political consideration from day 1 (RFIs) to now (commercial negotiations). There were no favourites, there were no back deals, the contenders were judged on merit and then price (L1/L2).I wouldn't be so sure about it, as I said I don't give that much about the PR campaign, but see the election as the bigger factor. That can change everything! From Rafale a handshake away of sealing the deal now (and I was warning for a long time that Dassault should speed up), to the EF coming back in the game when a new government is in power. In Brazil the president, the defence minister openly supported the Rafale, but then the election came and a nearly fixed deal went into new evaluation and now even to a major blow for Dassault. I really don't want the same to happen in India too, at least unless the offer for India is more favourable and the longer the selection takes, the better for the EF.
As you yourself have pointed out- allocations have been made for the next fiscal year to get such deals signed so I don't see elections changing much. India has matured on this front to be fair, Antony (as much as I hate agreeing with him on anything) when he says defence deals in India are largely free from political interference. I am pretty sure Modi or whomever has little interest in getting involved in defence matter and especially these sort of high profile deals. For one he's not going to want to pi$$ off the IAF who have been pressing for these birds for a long long time and desperately need them. If Modi even considers a change of direction the IAF, I am very confident, will set him straight. Up until now all the MMRCA work has been done very professionally and throughly just to avoid any sort of back tracking or cause to cancel the deal- there i very little grounds for just cancelling the deal and gifting it to the EFT. I am actually quite confident the deal will be signed by mid-2014.
And I spoke to a friend of mine who works for a firm in the EFT consortium (not directly involved in the EFT project but pretty clued up on company matter as a whole especially pertaining to India) and he says that all this talk is quite "silly" and that the confidence the EFT players had about 1 year ago in getting back into the race has all but gone. Any comments that come out are PR showmanship and for appearances more than anything (especially where the UK govt is concerned) this is the line they HAVE to take i.e. "we are ready to step in blah blah blah".... the EFT guys seem all to aware of the fact that this one has all but got away from them. They are not expecting any phone calls from the MoD on this front. In fact the dedicated EFT sales team they had in India has been disbanded and the members relocated to other projects or other parts of the world so I doubt the EFT consortium has even done as much work on revising a bid as you'd have hoped @sancho.