forget media forget about everything for a second the million dollar question is why three long years and still dragging feet , everyone of us have their likes and dis like but why such a long delays ? what is stopping Dassault MOD IAF HAL from cracking the deal?
Because of Dassault and Reliance!
When you go back and check the reports, especially those with official statements from Dassault or the Indian side from 2012 onwards, it gets clear how and when the deal got caught up. After selecting Rafale as L1, the Indian side hoped to fix the deal in 8 to 9 months, which obviously was overambitious as it often is in India, but Dassault made pretty good progress in that time and officials stated, that more than half of the negotiations would be done!
In Dec 2012 however things gone bad, when Dassault made up the workshare issue, openly and knowingly deviating from the RFP to gain more advantages for them and Reliance and when that didn't worked since MoD and IAF was clear about their stand on the RFP and HAL, they kept going on with seperate contracts, with seperate liability and not taking responsibility for the licence produced fighters.
Settling the workshare and contract issue alone, wasted a lot of time that could had been used to fix the rest of the offset and ToT part, but Dassault went to slow mode until these issues were not settled and with the elections in reach, it was evident that the deal was at risk at least for further delays.
Dassault was then only able to fully comply to offset requirements at the end of 2013 / early 2014 and with the elections the ToT compliance was achieved only by July 2014, while the issues on liability and responsibility went on, although the Indian point of view didn't changed, with the new government on the same line as the older and as IAF!
Indian contracts and bureaucracy is complicated, no doubt about that, but what happened since the L1 selection is solely based on Dassault (with influence of Reliance). Without these issues, the deal could had been easily signed till mid 2013 and that's the frustrating part, when a company that is advertising itself as a reliable partner for India and the IAF, is messing with such an important deal in this manner!
However, none of this could had been changed by modifying the procedure of the tender, since anything after the L1 selection is mainly based on the fast performance of the OEM. The faster it finds Indian companies to divert offsets and get them into contracts, the faster they can comply to offset and ToT requirements of the tender. All the MoD had to do, was monitoring the improvements and judge if everything goes according to the rules and regulations.
Our part was between sending out the RFP and the selection of L1, where IAF and the MoD did there work and surely some parts could had been faster there. For example, selecting only fighters to the trials that complied to the performance requirements of IAF, or that had proper prototypes available to test. That alone could had cut the trial period, just as evaluating the results before the shortlisting in half, but that's a common problem in the forces, that they don't make proper RFPs that narrows things down, which results it too large evaluations.
5- Isn't there somehow a part of internal politics in all that "game", BJP wishing to show that thy do better than congress?
If that would be the case, they would have tried to fix the deal right away and not to delay it further, since only that would had shown that they actually can fast track things. That however is not the case, in fact they have the same problems with Dassault that the former government had too, so politically India remains steady in this deal.
