Consider what this money could have purchased. Had successive Indian governments invested in building a credible indigenous defence manufacturing ecosystem decades ago, India would not be writing this cheque to Dassault. The state of the Indian Air Force today is a direct consequence of decisions made — and not made — when independent India was being built.

The numbers are brutal. India is paying approximately $316 million per aircraft for the Rafale F4, with indigenous content composition looking pretty underwhelming – to say the least. Add this to the 2016 deal for 36 Rafale F3 jets that cost $8.8 billion, and the 2025 deal for 26 Rafale-M naval fighters that cost $7.4 billion. That is nearly $60 billion flowing to France over a single decade.

Sixty billion dollars that could have been deployed to stand up defence manufacturing capacity, develop supply chains, and create an ecosystem for indigenous innovation.

Instead, India handed the cheque to France.

The roots of this crisis trace back to Jawaharlal Nehru and the vision he inherited from Gandhi. When independent India’s first Industrial Policy Resolution was announced in 1948, the government reserved defence equipment manufacturing exclusively for the state. This was not done carelessly. There was logic to it. India needed to build a sovereign defence-industrial base that could not be held hostage by foreign powers. The plan was sound. The execution was not.

The state created Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. It created Defence Research and Development Organisation. These were meant to be the instruments of........

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