Rafale Morale

30 July 2020

If this has not been true, it could never have sold as fiction. Mind you, India has received military aircraft right from its early days as a post Independent Non Aligned power from French and Soviet sources the first from the Dassault Stable indeed was called in India as ‘Toofani’ and India before the Mirage 2000s had squadrons of previous Mirage iterations too, so what happened with the Rafale that India went ‘bonkers’ which is a mild term for what was on display nonstop for the last 72 hours?

I come away just hoping that the Rafale fanfare will not take away the devotion Indians showed to the then fighter which emerged due to the superior dog fight skills of India’s Finest as the Gnat Devata. One grew up listening to stories of 1965 and 1971 when technologically disadvantaged India fought with the US frontline equipment manned by Pakistan and still managed to whip them. Proudly our elders used to sell us this aphorism- It is the man behind the machine that counts!

As if to sell this very philosophy India underwent a series of popular discourses about the role of machines, about modernisation itself, as opposed to traditional values and scientific ‘backwardness’ even as the world was reaping the benefits of disruptive human migrations across the global arena, through Continental refugees who came to ‘Liberty’s Shores’ and some who disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. India’s first roar in Space was carried on a vehicle that was probably the first human mobility vehicle – a cart reined by bullocks! India also had a batsman who went on to beat the great Don Bradman in statistics of Test Cricket, Mr Sunil Gavaskar who never sported a helmet on the field despite being an opening batsman for over two decades, against what old timers and statistics record as the fierce some pace packs of the mighty Windies and a pair called Lillee and Thompson from Down Under! If there was anything in those post wars period of the 70s to 90s that spoke the logic of relying on human ingenuity and skill to counter the need for technology, unwittingly Sunil Manohar Gavaskar with his sola topee and hat made it every time the legend took guard over his stumps!
We are dealing with a subject called National Psyche which is a part of the larger array of subjects that are components of Net Assessment. So if the Americans earned an unfair reputation of chickening out when ‘body bags’ started coming home in numbers, after the Vietnam war, you can say that every strategist worth their salt, invoked this ‘weakness’ while discussing the prospects of Gulf Wars 1 and 2 and subsequently the US campaign against Al Qaeda! Yet, why I termed the assessment as ‘unfair’ is because, when it came to the objective the American military machine delivered undeterred by the odds of those body bags. If any one wants to watch, my favourite movie about the Fallen and respect that they need to be given in civil society, it is ‘Taking Chance’, about how the mortal remains of American soldiers are received in CONUS and taken to their homes for proper military and community ceremonies. Despite this, US took casualties in Iraq wars and in Afghanistan. The tactical failure in Afghanistan is not military, but political, for at the time of 9/11 and subsequent documentation of evidence. Ali Soufan is a National Figure then FBI Agent, for breaking down the exact involvement of the various intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Saudi and other countries in the 9/11 plot including the CIA’s own failures to connect obvious dots in the days and months when such clues were available about the attacks themselves. Yet US chose politically to overlook Saudi and Pakistani involvement and roped in these countries in their quest to quell the Taliban who were identified as rogue and non state! That is the primary reason that 18 years on, US finds Afghanistan a quagmire, not some legends about Afghan tribes, that has not afforded the US a victory in Afghanistan the way the surge yielded results in Iraq before ISIS became a new problem. Remember today ISIS is not the problem again because of the US military and to an extent the Russian support for Assad regime that ensured that ISIS could not grow beyond Raqqa.

Today, again analysts are making assumptions but without evidence that the Chinese PLA will be chary of committing troops to combat, because of China’s One Child Policy. They forget that China routinely suffered natural disasters of great magnitude, not to mention the current ongoing pandemic, where the authorities in Beijing have managed to do fancy footing with the casualty estimates and the Chinese people have merely expressed solidarity as they did on the Day of Reverence to Tombs of Ancestors this year for all those lives lost to Wuhan virus! Several Indian and international analysts were seen in TV debates indulging this barrier to taking casualties by Chinese when discussing the responses and reviews of the Eastern Ladakh situation and Galwan valley clash of neanderthal proportions! The point I am making is that reputations are awarded and nations wear these easily on their sleeve unmindful of their falseness, because part of the Comprehensive National Power calculus is resilience factor, one that makes for the X factors under weightage awarded for such calculations after force levels, economic strength, demographic strength, cultural and index of solidarity are all taken on board.

So how does one look at India now? On the face of it, this was an orchestrated Jamboree. Why? Because as veterans on social media like @Kapius a naval aviator to boot, noted the ‘out of character’ radio traffic when the Arrow leader broke Radio Silence and called to the Indian Naval Ship below the INS Kolkatahttps://twitter.com/realkaypius/status/1288504327657492480?s=20 and for that to be relayed through the nowadays official public broadcaster/news agency ANI and carried by all media channels and quickly in WhatsApp shows that this was with strict orders right from the ‘Top’, for there is no way else, mid oceans and mid air, anyone else could have picked up this conversation and shared it with the rest of India and the world! Then there was the most unusual and usually reticent personal Twitter handle of the Defence Minister Mr Rajnath Singh, ( to examine further or compare, just see the Hon’ble Minister’s TL with that of his much junior cabinet colleagues like Mr Goyal, Mr Javdekar, Ms Sitaraman, because unlike Ms Irani they are not public personas before they are politicians and executives in Government.) tweet-video sharing the touch down at Ambala Air Force station of the Arrow Leader!

It was over the top, because the Rafale is a known aircraft nearly two decades old in development and manufacture and use by the French airforce, a peer of Thunderbolt of EU Aviation Agency, the Gripen, F16 D block and F18 A and certainly not stealth or FGFA ( like F35 or the Chinese PLAAF-J20) yet Indian media anchors ( I call them baiters and sincerely think of them as barterers, for they must be having a quid pro quo with the narrative setters as they settle down to drive narratives daily!) chose to call this the best fighter in Asia already! We all know the details of how India specific instrumentation, software, aero suite for navigation and radar, and other flight controls will be made available only from 2022 onward, and this lot of five was to be delivered last year and has been delayed for which the Corona Virus is to blame! The hype was as if the Arrow Squadron’s five were the Pandavas returning from vanquishing the Kauravas at Kurukshetra! One veteran tweeted that it was as if the Chinese withdrew from Eastern Ladakh as the five approached Indian airspace where they were duly escorted by two Su30 MKIs. Our folks forget easily how the Su 30 MKIs were at one time being considered by the Australian RAF for induction when the F35 project was stalling, such is its standing amongst western aviation experts! We can’t blame them when a former Air Chief ACM Dhanoa( Retd) made a claim about Operation Swift Retort in which India lost a MiG21 and Pakistan an F16, that the same would have ended differently if IAF had fielded the Rafales!

So as some commentators say, the new bridegroom of India, the Rafale will enjoy the status of the one who can do no wrong for some time! But even in the midst of this focus, our military was sending signals to the world, by getting the INS Kolkata class in spotlight, India’s first stealth ship with guided missile destroyer designation who is capable of firing Brahmos and Barak missiles, while asserting the presence of Su30MKIs that are now Brahmos capable themselves. The ability to showcase hypersonic missile platforms on water and air, places India in a rare club of nations in itself! There was also a national political interest to counter the controversial circumstances in which the MMRCA deal of the Rafale was short circuited and to bring about closure to that by using the same argument the INC patented when Bofors guns proved their worth three decades later in Kargil border war! While Rafale was flown to India, the Dassault’s chosen partner for offset in India Mr Anil Ambani’s Reliance ADAG is bankrupt and facing liquidation proceedings from Chinese and other international lenders, not to mention Indian banks consortium!