 "Illustration: Binay Sinha")
Since its first flight in 2001, India’s homegrown Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA) has faced two decades of unrelenting opposition from the Indian Air Force (IAF). For long, the fighter pilots who make all the key decisions in the IAF opposed the indigenous fighter’s entry into service, arguing that it lacked the performance needed for surviving in the highly-contested airspace that would prevail in an Indo-Pakistan or Sino-Indian war. Only last year was the Ministry of Defence (MoD) able to push through an order for 83 Tejas Mark 1A fighters — an improved version of the aircraft that will start
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