New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday slammed Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for alleging corruption against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government in the Rafale fighter jet deal for the Indian Air Force concluded in 2015.
In a blog on his Facebook page, Jaitley, who returned to work last week after several months of absence from the finance ministry after a kidney transplant surgery, posed a series of 15 questions to Gandhi, whose party hopes to make the deal a key political issue ahead of the 2019 general polls.
The questions posed by Jaitley included frequent changes in prices of the Rafale quoted by Gandhi in his speeches, and whether Gandhi was aware of the fact that if the basic aircraft price on which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was to purchase the aircraft was 9% higher than the price negotiated by the NDA.
“Can Shri Rahul Gandhi deny that when the add-ons such as India-specific adaptations, weaponry, etc. are installed on the basic aircraft, the UPA price, which was mentioned in the 2007 offer, would be at least 20% costlier than the more favourable price negotiated by the NDA?” was another question posed by Jaitley.
Noting that the previous government had in principle accepted the necessity of procuring 126 aircraft in 2001, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government set the ball rolling for the procurement of 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft with a request for proposal issued on 28 August, 2007. On the basis of this two vendors — Dassault Aviation and EADS — were found compliant with the government’s requirements. Thereafter “it took the UPA five more years to commence the negotiations and in January 2012 the Contract Negotiation Committee (CNC) determined Dassault Aviation to be L1,” Jaitley said.
“For reasons best known to the UPA government, on 27 June, 2012, the deal was directed to be re-examined, which effectively meant that the entire eleven-year exercise was abandoned and the process was to be undertaken afresh,” Jaitley said, adding that this was causing India’s fighter squadron strength to deplete.
In contrast, on 10 April, 2015, India and France agreed to a deal in which “India decided to procure 36 Rafale aircraft from the French government on terms better than the ones conveyed by Dassault in the L1 bid of 2007,” Jaitley said. This was then approved by the Defence Acquisition Council within a month and the agreement initialled in 2016.
The “slow and casual approach of the UPA government seriously compromised national security requirements,” Jaitley said, accusing Gandhi and the Congress party of delaying the deal by a decade, and seriously compromising national security, running a false campaign against the NDA government on pricing and procedural irregularities and, in this process, causing a delay in procurement so that India’s defence preparedness further suffers.
Jaitley on his part posed 15 questions to Gandhi and the Congress party under four different heads: delay, being unsure of their facts, the role of private industry and on procedure.