Indefensible Defence - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 220

facturing industry in recent years. This has not only cut its need for foreign equipment, but
has also turned it into the world's fifth-largest arms exporter with $11bn orders between
2011 and 2012. 3 (Pakistan, its close ally, takes 55 per cent of the sales,) 4 This sort of trans-
formation is something that India has singularly failed even to try to do despite its success
in other areas such as space technology (in November 2013, it launched a ten-month space-
craft mission to Mars).
Manmohan Singh's national security advisor, Shivshankar Menon, has warned that talk
of India's strategic autonomy and of increasing degrees of independence has little meaning
unless there is 'a quantum improvement' in India's defence production and innovation cap-
abilities. 5 'A country that does not develop and produce its own major weapons platforms
has a major strategic weakness, and cannot claim true strategic autonomy. This is a real
challenge for us all,' he said.
A chief of army staff, General V.K. Singh, highlighted inefficiencies (during a public
row over his retirement age), in a letter he sent to the prime minister that was leaked to
the media. 6 He said that 80 per cent of India's armoured tanks were night blind, and listed
tank ammunition and air defence problems. The infantry had 'deficiencies of crew-served
weapons' and lacked night-fighting capabilities. Elite special forces were 'woefully short'
of 'essential weapons', and there were 'large-scale voids' in critical surveillance capabilit-
ies. 'Like the medieval times you fight morning to evening and take rest at night - Pakistan
has 80 per cent of tanks capable to fight at night,' said Rahul Bedi, a defence journalist. 7
'Planning and strategic thinking of the Indian Army's procurement programme is in com-
plete shambles. Bureaucrats and politicians are throttling the procurement process'.
The high level of foreign purchase has been needed because India's generally inefficient
defence research and its defence public sector undertakings (DPSUs) could not meet de-
mand - not even, till recently, for high-technology equipment like modern helmets and
night-vision goggles, let alone the latest fighter aircraft, submarines and guns. This is
primarily because the private sector has generally been kept out of doing more than sup-
plying minor components, while the defence establishment enjoyed the combined benefits
of protected jobs, patronage, prestige and foreign kickbacks. Yet private sector companies
in the field of automobiles, engineering systems and information technology have proved
themselves in the past decade to be internationally competitive and have the potential to
become significant defence manufacturers.
Tatra Tangle
A scandal that dominated Indian newspaper headlines for weeks in 2012 brought together
all the corruption, poor public sector production, lack of technological development and