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India finally to replace its 'flying
coffins'
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - The Indian government's announcement
that it has finally concluded 15 years of negotiations
to buy 66 advanced jet trainers from British Aerospace
comes in the wake of mounting public criticism of its
policy of training young pilots on accident-prone
Russian-built MiG-21 fighters.
The deal,
announced on Wednesday, worth US$2 billion, was stalled
for years thanks to allegations that defense contractors
and middlemen were pushing the British Hawk-ZJ100 over
offers from several other countries, including France,
Italy and Brazil that manufacture similar trainer jets.
Meanwhile, the notoriously unwieldy MiG-21 were
dropping out of Indian skies at the astonishing rate of
one each month - resulting in scores of young Indian
pilots losing their lives.
Last month, grieving
parents and widows of the perished pilots took the
matter up to President Abdul Kalam, a former scientist
who once headed the prestigious Defense Research and
Development Organization (DRDO), to persuade the Defense
Ministry to ground the aging "widow-makers".
"The Defense Ministry should honestly accept
that there are problems with the MiG-21s which need to
be tackled on a war footing," the relatives of the dead
pilots said in petition they handed over to Kalam, who
promised help.
Kalam did not need much
persuasion. He had led a committee that five years ago
recommended several measures to improve safety in the
Indian Air Force, especially the induction of advanced
jet trainer to train rookie pilots.
In spite of
chalking up 52 MiG-21 crashes in the past three years,
the Defense Ministry steadfastly maintained that the
aircraft was safe. To prove the point, Defense Minister
George Fernandes himself flew in one of them in July as
co-pilot.
Aged 73, Fernandes thinks nothing of
flying advanced Sukhoi-30 fighters, staying overnight on
submarines or frequently visiting "the world's highest
battlefield" on the 23,000 foot-high Siachen glacier to
keep up troop morale.
But Fernandes' maneuvers
in a MiG-21 only drew the ire of parents like Kavita and
Anil Gadgil, who lost their young sons. Anil Gadgil,
himself a former pilot, reacted by saying that instead
of finding a solution to the problem, the minister had
taken a "joy ride and performed a political stunt".
Before meeting Kalam, Kavita, whose son Abhishek
was killed in a training sortie in 2001, had to crash
through security barriers to get to Fernandes and
present petitions seeking improved safety norms "for the
sake of other young men and their loved ones".
Russian officials representing the MiG-21
manufacturers have blamed the crashes on the purchase of
spare parts by India from uncertified sources in Eastern
Europe, where the MiG-21 is common, and said that they
could not be held responsible for "spurious spares".
In any case, the beneficiary of the 280 MiG-21
peacetime crashes since 1990, claiming 120 lives, was
British Aerospace, which will now sell 24 of its
advanced jet trainers in a "flyaway condition" and
produce the remaining 24 in India, according to India's
defense secretary Ajay Prasad.
The delivery of
the first British jets will take place nearly three
years after the actual contract is signed, but Prasad
said that Indian pilots will now be sent to Britain to
train.
Former Air Force chief N C Suri, a
long-time critic of delays in buying the advanced jet
trainers, laid the blame on India's civilian defense
bureaucracy. "This is not an aviator country and
civilians don't understand the air force's needs," he
said.
The Hawk ZJ-100, which has "ground-attack"
capability, is manufactured by British Aerospace
Enterprise Systems and the British government, has been
pushing hard to persuade India to buy the jets. Its
salesmen have included Prime Minister Tony Blair,
himself in the middle of defusing a military standoff
between India and Pakistan, last year.
The
competition has included the L159B, a Czech-US joint
venture. US Secretary of State Colin Powell is reported
to have written to the Indian government assuring him
that there would be no spare parts hold-ups, as has
happened in the past as a consequence of military
sanctions imposed on India's independent nuclear and
missile programs.
But the Defense Ministry has
clearly favored the Hawk in spite of its unsavory
association with such dictators as Indonesia's former
president Suharto, who used them to suppress the
liberation movement in East Timor and by Zimbabwe's
Robert Mugabe in his war against Congo.
India's
Hawk deal nearly went through in 2001, but for a massive
defense scandal in which the web portal Tehelka filmed
the president of George Fernandes' Samata Party, Jaya
Jaitley, agreeing to accept money to help fix a defense
deal.
Fernandes resigned, but was re-inducted
before he was cleared of the charges and he has since
been the victim of a boycott in parliament by opposition
parties. Worse, his staunch advocacy of the British Hawk
became suspect in spite of his repeated protestations of
honesty in the deal.
(Inter Press
Service)
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