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New Delhi: For more than a decade, successive BJP-led governments have championed Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant) in the defence sector, pursuing self-reliance and indigenisation as the cornerstone of India’s military modernisation strategy.

They have repeatedly emphasised minimal dependence on imported materiel, strategic autonomy in arms acquisition, and issued successive Positive Indigenisation Lists – earlier termed Negative Import Lists – that progressively reserved scores of military platforms and thousands of sub-systems and components for domestic production.

The policy’s enduring objective has been unambiguous: to create a self-sustaining defence-industrial base (DIB) capable of designing, developing, manufacturing and eventually exporting much of the country’s future military hardware and war-fighting equipment.

Yet, in a striking policy paradox, New Delhi is simultaneously negotiating a Reciprocal Defence Procurement Agreement (RDPA) with Washington as part of its broader effort to resolve bilateral trade disputes and finalise a wider economic and commercial package encompassing strategic sectors.

The RDPA traces its origins to June 2023, when then US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s visit to New Delhi placed reciprocal defence procurement on the bilateral agenda. The initiative gathered further momentum during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to Washington later that month, with both governments incorporating it into a broader roadmap for defence-industrial cooperation.

By October 2023, the Pentagon had formally initiated negotiations on the agreement by inviting public and industry comments on granting India “qualifying country” status under US procurement regulations, even as the extent of reciprocal access to India’s own procurement market remained undetermined.

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Official sources in New Delhi, however, said no comparable public consultation or industry outreach appears to have been undertaken by the government on the broad contours and ramifications of the RDPA, despite its potentially far-reaching implications for the country’s defence-industrial base (DIB) and its broader Aatmanirbhar agenda. With broader India-US trade negotiations now nearing closure, their outcome could also influence the final shape and scope of the RDPA.

But, once concluded, the RDPA is expected to establish a framework for reciprocal access to substantial segments of each country’s defence procurement market, raising a fundamental question: can India reconcile its long-standing Aatmanirbhar objective of building a self-sustaining defence-industrial base (DIB) by opening that market to the world’s largest military-industrial ecosystem?

Defence industry executives and security analysts contend that the central issue is not reciprocity itself, but the final shape of the India-US RDPA. They warn that, without adequate safeguards for domestic industry, it could tilt the competitive balance decisively in favour of far larger and better-resourced American defence firms, at a time when India’s armed forces are undertaking what is arguably their most ambitious modernisation programme to date to build capabilities for futuristic multi-domain operations.

The core concern, they argue, is that rather than nurturing India’s emerging defence-industrial base (DIB), the RDPA could force domestic manufacturers into direct competition with some of the world’s largest defence conglomerates for contracts that........

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