Former Union Ministers Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha and activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Wednesday demanded the government to immediately make public all details of the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets, while claiming that the Bofors scandal pales before what they alleged to be a ₹35,000 crore scam. The three of them said the 2015 purchase from France is “an enormous scandal that jeopardises national security.”
In a statement issued on behalf of Rajesh K. Dhingra, CEO of Reliance Defence and Aerospace, the company denied all the allegations. It claimed that “no contract has been given to any Reliance Group company by the Ministry of Defence related to the purchase of the 36 Rafale aircraft”, and pointed out that none of the 36 fighters are to be made in India.
He also denied that the Anil Ambani group was selected as the offset partner because of its proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “As per DPP (Defence Procurement Process), the Ministry of Defence has no role in the selection of Indian partners by the foreign vendors. This has been the position right from 2005, when offsets were first introduced in the country,” Mr. Dhingra said.
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Mr. Shourie said the deal is a classical scandal that shows “criminal misconduct, misuse of public office and subversion of national security. Bofors was absolutely nothing before this.”
“The clue then was the shifting statements of the government, the clues now are the shifting statements of the government,” he said, while calling on the Opposition to relentlessly follow the case “like BJP followed Bofors.” He also asked the media to dig deeper without succumbing to planted stories from the government.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan said the Rafale purchase was the “biggest defence scam this country has seen.” He said the government-to-government purchase announced in April 2015 during Mr. Modi’s visit to France was done “without a single person in the Air Force or the Ministry of Defence” being consulted. He also claimed that the present Air Force chief Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa — then the Vice Chief — was in Paris when the deal was announced, but he was not aware of the decision to buy just 36, by cancelling the ongoing open tender negotiations for 126 Rafale fighters. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar too was not aware, Mr. Bhushan claimed.
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He said the Modi government on November 18, 2016 told Parliament that the cost of “each Rafale aircraft is approximately ₹670 crore and all the aircraft will be delivered by April 2022.”