Timothy J Roemer, the US ambassador to India, who has just resigned is said to have told Michele Flournoy, a top Pentagon official, that US might lose India’s trust due to various factors. The aircraft which lost out are F-16 from Lockheed Martin and F-18 from Boeing IDS.
Though Pentagon has put on a brave face after the two American fighters were rejected by India from the $12 billion medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) deal for 126 warplanes for the Indian Air Force (IAF), but the fear of this rejection find echo as far back as 2009 in one of the cables recently leaked, wherein Timothy J Roemer, the US ambassador to India, who has just resigned is said to have told Michele Flournoy, a top Pentagon official, that US might lose India’s trust due to various factors. The aircraft which lost out are F-16 from Lockheed Martin and F-18 from Boeing IDS.
The October 2009 cable, made available to western agencies, talks about how US could not cash-in on the “newly improved environment” and fail to prove to be a reliable supplier of defence equipment, and also that the US-Pak relationship could also be a rationale that US would not be trusted by India, said Roemer, referring the “new environment” as the newly formed UPA-II government in 2009. The cable also talks about US competitors using the economic sanctions imposed by Washington on India in 1998, as a reason to harm prospects of US sales.
Recently the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, Robert Blake, had said that the Indo-US strategic dialogue would go ahead in July, as planned, headed by secretary of state Hillary Clinton, adding that Washington was looking ahead to a significant cooperation between the two nations in frontiers of defence technology.
Presently in the US’ kitty are Indian deals worth approximately $10 billion, for different equipment, which amounts to a single MMRCA deal.
Former airforce chief S Krishnaswamy told DNA, “We have a government approved procedure in place, and it was a fair, transparent evaluation of all aircraft, and we want the best for our country, so I think the selection has been quite fair.” India’s defence spending is slated to rise to about $80 billion by 2015.
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