INDIA: Jet Deal Addresses Criticism of Use of ‘Flying Coffins’

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Sep 3 2003 (IPS) - The Indian government’s announcement that it was concluding a 15-year-old deal to buy 66 advanced jet trainers from British Aerospace comes in the wake of mounting public criticism of its policy of training young pilots on accident-prone Russian-built Mig-21 fighters.

The deal worth two billion U.S. dollars, announced Wednesday, was stalled for years thanks to allegations that defence contractors and middlemen were pushing the British Hawk-ZJ100′ over offers from several other countries, including France, Italy and Brazil that manufacture similar trainer jets.

Meanwhile, the notoriously unwieldy Mig-21 were dropping out of Indian skies at the astonishing rate of one each month – resulting in scores of young Indian pilots losing their lives.

Last month, grieving parents and widows of the perished pilots took the matter up to President Abdul Kalam, a former scientist who once headed the prestigious Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), to persuade the Defence Ministry to ground the ageing ‘widow-makers.’

”The Defence Ministry should honestly accept that there are problems with the Mig-21s which need to be tackled on a war footing,” the relatives of the dead pilot said in petition they handed over to Kalam, who promised help.

Kalam did not need much persuasion. He had led a committee that five years ago recommended several measures to improve safety in the Indian Air Force, especially the induction of advanced jet trainer to train ‘rookie’ pilots.

In spite of chalking up 52 Mig-21 crashes in the last three years, the Defence Ministry steadfastly maintained that the aircraft was safe. To prove the point, Defence Minister George Fernandes himself flew in one of them in July as co-pilot.

Aged 73, Fernandes thinks nothing of flying advanced Sukhoi-30 fighters, staying overnight on submarines or frequently visiting ”the world’s highest battlefield” on the 23,000 foot-high Siachen glacier to keep up troop morale.

But Fernandes’ manoeuvres in a Mig-21 only drew the ire of parents like Kavita and Anil Gadgil, who had lost their young sons. Anil Gadgil, himself a former pilot, reacted by saying that instead of finding a solution to the problem, the minister had taken a ”joy ride and performed a political stunt”.

Before meeting Kalam, Kavita, whose son Abhishek was killed in a training sortie in 2001, had to crash through security barriers to get to Fernandes and present petitions seeking improved safety norms – ”for the sake of other young men and their loved ones”.

Russian officials representing the MiG-21 manufacturers have blamed the crashes on the purchase of spare parts by India from uncertified sources in Eastern Europe, where the Mig-21 is common, and said they could not be held responsible for ”spurious spares”.

In any case, the beneficiary of the 102 Mig-21 peacetime crashes since 1990, claiming 45 lives, was British Aerospace which will now sell 24 of its advanced jet trainers in a ‘flyaway condition’ and produce the remaining 24 in India, according to India’s Defence secretary Ajay Prasad at a press conference on Wednesday.

The delivery of the first British gets would take place nearly three years after the actual contract is signed, but Prasad Indian pilots will now be sent to Britain to train.

Former Air Force chief N C Suri, a long-time critic of delays in buying the advanced jet trainers, laid the blame on India’s civilian defence bureaucracy. ”This is not an aviator country and civilians don’t understand the air force’s needs,” he said in a telephone interview.

The Hawk ZJ-100, which has ‘ground-attack’ capability is manufactured by British Aerospace Enterprise Systems and the British government, has been pushing hard to persuade India to buy the jets. Its salesmen have included Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself in the middle of defusing a military standoff between India and Pakistan, last year.

The competition has included the L159B, a Czech-U.S. joint venture. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is reported to have written to the Indian government assuring him there would be no spare parts hold-ups as has happened in the past as a consequence of military sanctions imposed on India’s independent nuclear and missile programmes.

But the Defence Ministry has clearly favoured the Hawk in spite of its unsavoury association with such dictators as Indonesia’s former President Suharto, who used them to suppress the liberation movement in East Timor and by Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in his war against Congo.

India’s Hawk deal nearly went through in 2001 but for a massive defence scandal in which a web portal ‘Tehelka’ filmed the president of George Fernandes’ Samata Party, Jaya Jaitley, agreeing to accept money to help fix a defence deal.

Fernandes resigned but was re-inducted before he was cleared of the charges and he has since been the victim of a boycott in parliament by opposition parties.

Worse, his staunch advocacy of the British Hawk became suspect in spite of his repeated protestations of honesty in the deal.