How India can end dependence on Russian weapons

Shifting toward buying more Western weapons systems and lessening its dependence on Russia, for instance, would bolster India’s autonomy. But the country would have to sacrifice affordability, meaning it wouldn’t be able to buy as much. India is spending $5.5 billion on the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile platform. The US-made Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system costs about six times that much, and isn’t even as versatile.

Suppose India wants both affordability and quality? Well, some countries have historically gotten by with fewer but more potent weapons — often because they’re closely tied to the West or to China, and benefit from the protection of their allies.

But India — with one prickly, giant neighbour to its north and one slightly smaller but still nuclear-armed neighbour to its west, and continents away from friends who could help in a conflict — is highly unlikely to want to rely on anyone else for essential defence requirements. In its last full-scale war with Pakistan, in 1971, India found itself constantly short of artillery shells, and had to secretly import mortars from an Israel it didn’t even recognise at the time.

Defence planners’ memories are long. Insufficient weapons on hand represent a loss of autonomy that no Indian government could possibly countenance.

For decades, India has tried to establish a local defence industry, building its own battle tank and jet. Unfortunately, our military hates the results — the Arjun tank and the Tejas fighter. The Arjun, the Indian Army complains, can’t be part of any battle plans on the canal-heavy, militarized border with Pakistan: It weighs almost 70 tons and would collapse most bridges in the Punjab. (By contrast, Russia’s T-90 tank weighs less than 50 tons.) Meanwhile, the Indian Air Force has a long list of reasons why the Tejas is not good enough: Its payload is smaller than the F-16’s, the plane takes too long to service, and so on.

In the short run, indigenisation offers affordability and autonomy, at the cost of quality. The question is whether India has the patience and political will to fight through early stumbles. China’s government invested for decades in the Shenyang J-8 fighter jet, which was significantly less-sophisticated than other interceptors of its time. Indian defence analysts might point out that it’s only through buying large numbers of subpar equipment, for decades, that China finally built the Chengdu J-20 stealth jet, which may well be a ‘near-peer’ of US fifth-generation fighters.

Of course, Chinese leaders didn’t have to deal with constant leaks to a free press from an incensed air force. Then there’s the fact that, in India at least, you are going to have to produce many, if not most, of these new jets and tanks and ships in the private sector. Are Indian politicians — and, more importantly, voters — willing to accept the delays and opacities associated with a bigger defence industry?

Oddly, it’s probably politically safer for literal boatloads of cash to go to Russian or Western defence companies than for a much smaller sum be paid to some Indian oligarch. The Indian State’s toxic relationship with the private sector is one of the biggest obstacles to indigenising weapons production.

Nevertheless, that’s what needs to be done. If Indian leaders want a reliable and affordable pipeline of weapons of decent quality that arrive quickly enough to deter an aggressive China, they are going to have to fund homegrown defence companies, convince voters of the need for big military budgets, suffer through failures and scandals, and field less powerful weapons until they can develop better ones.

The task will be messy and politically difficult. They should probably get started.

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.  Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.