That's not true. The original tanker competition was scrapped, a new one initiated about 1 year later. So for your suggestion to be feasible the IAF would have to scrap the MMRCA procurement and re-bid it?
Only because MoD tried to get Boeing into the competition, because their tanker would had fulfilled the requirements too, which either would had forced the Airbus to lower their own cost or had opened a 2nd real MRTT as an option. The point however is, there was no complete new evalutaion, they only included the life cycle calculation to the new bids and then took a decision.
In the MMRCA we already know that only 2 fighters fulfill the requirements and even in 2018 that won't change, since the Gripen doesn't get better, nor was any upgrade funded yet for the F18SH, so all MoD has to do again is, to re-evaluate the results of the EF and Rafale, under the new delivery timeline and the changes that now came up and then get to a new L1 and L2 decision.
You can't simply turn around after the date and say "we will now change our bid", this defeats the whole purpose of a CLOSED BID process and undermines the entire MMRCA selection process to date.
Again you stick to the bids, which is not the important point here! The real issue is, the delays that does not clear delivery according to the RFP and the fact that there are changes that must be considered if the bids still comply to the RFP or if additonal cost must be added. IRST was included in the Rafale bid initially, but by then it was under production. Now they want to divert the production to Samtel as part of the ToT / offset offer, but who funds the set up of this new production line? Dassault doesn't because French forces don't buy the IRST anymore, that means this ammount of money must be added to the bid. Same goes for the not available Damocles XF, contrary to the initial bid. Not to mention that if there is an issue in the life cycle cost calculation (according to the article based on IAFs side), they had to reconsider it anyway and till then the bids might need to be re-newed anyway.
Letting the EFT back in now would be opening a can of worms the IAF cannot afford.
But it's not IAF's call to make and MoD has to look at the bigger picture not only on what IAF wants. If we did what IAF wanted, we just had ordered more M2Ks while the government wanted more benefits for the Indian industry too.
it would only hurt India and other defence procurements.
How does it hurt India when we would get a better deal, or more fighters in a faster way, or more industrial maybe even development benefits?