Will the Government disclose what the Supreme Court has asked it to? It's getting curious…
In the space of three weeks the Supreme Court has gone from virtually giving the Government a free hand on the Rafale fighter jet deal with France to asking the ruling dispensation to disclose the process by which the offset partners, including the Anil Ambani group company Reliance Defence, were selected. This has in effect provided a huge political campaign talking point for the Government's critics, including Rahul Gandhi and the Congress apart from the likes of Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha, who have been persistently focusing on the alleged wrongdoings in the deal for months. Whether Rahul Gandhi is right or not, he has to be credited with having stayed on point though, equally, some of the facts he has are muddled. The fact is that the Government and its spokespersons including the Defence Minister have made an utter meal of the allegations. Instead of coming out in the open about the deal, they have tried to obfuscate the issue. Even when independent journalists, many not friendly to the Government, have defended the deal on the basis of the facts in the public domain, the Centre has not backed them up with evidence to underline the assessment the deal was kosher. Instead, the administration has snorted with righteous indignation upon being questioned. Surely, there was a case for engaging seriously with the questions being asked by credible, public-spirited interventionists even while countering politically those questioning the deal on the basis of a priori assumptions and mala fide intentions. By lumping all its critics in one basket, as it were, the Government has not done itself any favours.
Now, the Government is not obliged to hand over any facts to the Supreme Court but it does have to put that on record in an affidavit. Like it or not, the Narendra Modi Government, more than Rahul Gandhi/Congress, has succeeded in giving the Rafale row political traction and the latter can't be blamed for talking it up in the cut-throat business that is contemporary Indian politics. There is a theory doing the rounds that the Government has let the Congress have a long rope on the Rafale issue because it wants the principal opposition party to have committed so decisively to making it a major campaign issue that it has no room for backtracking when the BJP ‘comes clean’ on the deal in an emphatic, public manner. Whether the recent apex court order has given the ruling party that opportunity remains to be seen. Alas, all this is continuing while the Indian Air Force’s fighter strength is woefully low, India has failed in developing a military-industrial complex, and the country remains the largest importer of military hardware in the world.