Rafale will fly, but the excuses won't

Procedures and institutional mechanisms have been severely undermined in negotiating the deal

The controversy around Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unilateral decision to buy 36 Rafale fighters from France, which picked up steam in late 2017, initially seemed a quixotic political attack by Rahul Gandhi, centred on allegations of over-payment and crony capitalism to favour the Reliance Group, headed by Anil Ambani, who is allegedly close to Mr Modi. However, over the last one-and-a-half years, a seemingly endless dribble of analyses and exposés have added credibility to a “Rafale scam” narrative, raising questions of impropriety, bypassing of procedures, modifying (no pun intended) standard contractual terms to suit foreign vendors and riding roughshod over