Washington: At his joint press appearance with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington on Tuesday, a journalist asked external affairs minister S Jaishankar if Russia would be able to meet India’s defence needs given the pressures it is under — and how New Delhi is thinking of diversification.
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Jaishankar, also a member of the cabinet committee on security, used the occasion to lay out the broad conceptual underpinning behind India’s military procurement. The key principles the minister underlined included technology, capability, terms/pricing, multi-sourcing, and getting the best deal possible to serve national interests.
First, he said that India had not faced any particular problems in terms of “servicing and spare parts supply of equipment” that India had got in the past from Russia.
He then said that where India got its military equipment and platforms was not a neither a new issue, nor had it particularly changed due to geopolitical tensions.
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“I think we look at possibilities across the world. We look at the quality of technology, the quality of capability, the terms on which that particular equipment is offered, and we exercise a choice which we believe is in our national interest.”
In the past 15 years, the minister said that India had procured a lot from the US “if you maybe consider, for example, aircraft – the C-17, the C-130, the P-8, or the Apache helicopter or the Chinooks or the howitzers, the M777 howitzers”. “We have done so from France when we bought recently their Rafale aircraft. We have done so from Israel.”
Jaishankar said India had a tradition of multi-sourcing, and the priority was to get the best deal possible. “How to get the optimal deal from a competitive situation is really what this is all about.”
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