The New Untouchables

In every endeavour you require the services of middlemen, a much maligned term that sounds more respectable when referred to as ‘facilitators’. While people of diverse faiths require the services of both ordained priests and self-styled godmen/Sadhvis to operationalise the two-way communications links between the Almighty and us mortal human beings, so too are such ‘facilitators’ required for expediting the decision-making processes associated with the procurement of major weapon systems for India’s armed forces. By the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of the scandals associated with Sweden’s Bofors AB and Germany’s HDW, the closely-knit community of such facilitators—having both business and political backgrounds—closed ranks in India and resolved to devise a fool-proof method of conducting their businesses based on a win-win doctrine. It was quite an ingenious and totally legal way of doing business. How? Kindly allow me to elaborate. The two key essential elements of this business plan are: an India-based citizen who must have access to business venture capital; and an NRI or PIO whose business interests are located abroad, and whose business activities are registered in an offshore tax-free haven. The next step is to register a shelf company in this tax haven and develop a business plan in areas where the Govt of India allows either 100% foreign ownership or majority shareholding by foreign corporate entities. Once ready, this business plan is then peddled in search of venture capital and bridging loans. Concurrently, the owners of this business plan—the facilitators—establish political linkages with those in power within the executive branch of the Govt of India—to gain insights into the short-term, medium-term and long-term weapons procurement programmes of the Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Air Force, the Indian Coast Guard Service, the central paramilitary forces, and the central intelligence agencies. Once the key programmes are identified the search then begins for suitable OEMs that are ‘preferred’ by both the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), keeping in mind the supreme national interests of India. Interestingly, by this stage, the decision-makers within the Govt of India have already decided who the preferred OEM will be, with the yet-to-be-conducted competitive tendering process just being an eyewash and an exercise in futility. I say this because under the existing decision-making process for military procurements, the end-user is only mandated to indulge in evaluating the competitive bids and has no final say in zeroeing in on one specific OEM/supplier. That is a political decision to be made by the Cabinet Committee on National Security after factoring in various variables such as the financial offer, state of bilateral trade/international relations between India and the country hosting the respective bidders, etc.

After having received the key selection criteria inputs from the MoD and MEA, the concerned facilitator, armed with his/her business plan, initiates contact with the already preferred OEM and takes the OEM into confidence, and consequently, the OEM conducts an independent audit of the business plan (which may include the setting up in India of a private airline, or business air charter service, or a telecommunications-related business franchise) and agrees to provide the necessary venture capital for setting up such business activities within India in lieu of being awarded the procurement contract from the MoD. The venture capital is then transferred by the OEM (usually through one of its business subsidiaries) to the offshore shelf company registered by the facilitator’s NRI/PIO business partner who in turn acts as the foreign institutional investor making a perfectly legal and no-nonsense investment in a newly registered business entity within India. The facilitator in turn appoints his/her proxies to the Board of Directors of the business entity to run the show, with the plan being to turn the private limited company into a publicly-listed company within 24 months of its launch, thereby getting access to additional venture capital through the capital markets both within India and abroad, something I like to refer to as OPM, or other people’s money.

By the time contract signature takes place between the preferred OEM and the MoD, the OEM has seen to the following: that the FDI has been pumped into India for a perfectly legitimate business venture; that the business venture has a clearly defined business roadmap under which it will undergo public listing within a pre-defined timeframe, and the resultant OPM will be used—perfectly legally—for making financial donations or extending aerial logistics support to the concerned political parties whenever required; that the venture capital extended by the OEM to the facilitator will be returned in successive tranches (via the OPM) back to the OEM or one of the OEM’s designated business subsidiaries. So what you have in the end is no legal wrongdoing, no financial impropriety, no stashing away of slush funds, and a totally transparent business plan whose execution is flawless and beyond any suspicion. If questioned, the OEM on its part is also able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that its adherence to the mandatory ‘Integrity Clause’ contained within the military procurement contract is total without any breach, that no financial remuneration was paid to anyone either within India or abroad for facilitating the military procurement’s contract signature, and there was no ‘hidden’ inflation of the contract value.

But let it be known that to date, following exhaustive internal enquiries and investigations conducted by Indian authorities, no shred of evidence has emerged to directly and conclusively imply that the business methodology I have outlined above was employed by any party in securing the Scorpene SSK procurement contract. Consequently, during a recent meeting held at the MoD between the Central Vigilance Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation, the Indian Navy HQ, and the Indian Chapter of Transparency International (headed by former Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral (Ret’d) R H Tahiliani), everyone concluded that it was impossible for anyone concerned to prove beyond reasonable doubt any allegations of corruption involving the on-going procurement of the six Scorpene SSKs. Consequently, life goes on as usual….Prasun K. Sengupta

ADDENDUM 1

Murky Deals

For a country with the world’s third-largest standing Army, seventh-largest Navy and the fourth-largest Air Force it should not come as a surprise when, from time to time, there are cases of financial misappropriations or alleged kickbacks associated with military procurements undertaken to sustain the armed forces’ force modernisation efforts. But what is undeniably surprising is that almost all the procurement scandals that have come to light thus far since the early 1980s have involved Western companies such as Sweden’s Bofors Defence, Germany HDW and recently South Africa’s Denel Group. Despite the fact that more than 70% of the armed forces’ operational weapon systems have since the early 1980s been imported from the former Soviet Union (USSR) and its successor state, the Russian Federation (in total, from 1960 till 2000, the USSR and Russia supplied India with almost $35 billion worth of military hardware), there has never been even a single recorded or revealed case of questionable purchases of weapons by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) from either the USSR, or Russia, or other former East Bloc countries like Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine or Belarus. That is until now.

The first ever revelation about alleged kickbacks received by senior MoD officials, including a Defence Minister himself, as a quid pro quo for purchasing weapons from the erstwhile USSR appears in the book titled ‘The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: The KGB and the World’, published by Penguin/Allen Lane. The book opened a Pandora’s box not only about the nature of bilateral relations between India and the erstwhile USSR between the 1950s through to the late 1980s, but also throw some light on how military-industrial cooperation between the two countries and India’s defence procurement practices throughout the 1970s and 1980s, both marked by a remarkable degree of opacity during this period, climbed to dizzying heights. The book, jointly written by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former senior archivist of the USSR’s civilian intelligence agency, the KGB, and Cambridge University Professor and intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, is a sequel to the whistle-blowing Volume I that was published in 1999 (detailing the KGB’s operations conducted in the West between 1917 and 1991) and has since been appreciated worldwide for the authoritativeness, quality, minutae and detail of the information copied over a 12-year period from thousands of top-secret KGB files by Mitrokhin, who defected to the UK after the USSR collapsed in 1992. Volume II deals with the KGB’s attempts to ‘communise’, ‘Sovietise’, make friends and influence people in the developing world, and two of its chapters reveal how in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by the KGB, how and why India became a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government, and why the KGB ‘residency’ in Delhi was one of the largest in the world outside the Soviet bloc, and was awarded the rare honour by the Centre (KGB HQ in Moscow) of being promoted to a ‘main residency’. The most significant revelation, as far as military hardware procurements from the erstwhile USSR go, is that India’s Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon in the mid-1960s was successfully persuaded to buy MiG-21PF (Type 74) interceptors instead of the English Electric Lightning for the Indian Air Force (IAF), and in return his general election campaigns in 1962 and 1967 were KGB-funded.

Yet, despite such authoritativeness, caution would be well-advised here. For while it is generally appreciated that the Soviets were extremely active in trying to influence Indian ‘intellectual opinion’ between the 1950s and 1980s, Volume II reveals only a part of the whole story. And this is because the KGB constituted only a part of the gigantic Soviet information-gathering apparatus that in a country like India also had several personnel and ‘indigenous high-value assets’ working in parallel for/in the payroll of other Soviet agencies such as the GRU (military intelligence), accredited Soviet mass media agencies such as Izvestia, ITAR-TASS, Novosti and Pravda, and most importantly, the Delhi-based Trade Representative’s Office that reported to the USSR’s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, which in turn was the sole Soviet government organ responsible for marketing and supplying weapons of Soviet origin to 76 countries, including India. To gain a comprehensive appreciation of the former USSR’s ‘intellectual penetration’ of India and its consequences as far as Indian military hardware procurements go, it is best to start with trying to find out where India found itself in the Soviet scheme of things. The USSR began engaging India seriously soon after the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s and took India seriously since the late 1960s because it had global interests, notably a definite military threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and a desire to reduce the US influence in the subcontinent. This was the only basis for the India-USSR relationship, which acquired a strategic dimension in August 1971 when both countries inked the India-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation and consequently both countries got what each wanted—the USSR achieved strategic encirclement of the PRC while India got:
· A credible but limited duration nuclear umbrella to discourage and even neutralise any Chinese military adventurism targeted against India in the event of a future round of India-Pakistan military hostilities.
· The much-needed diplomatic support from the East Bloc at the UN Security Council as well as the crucial military hardware-cum-war wastage reserves required to successfully undertake the 14-day ‘Lightning Campaign’ that resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in December 1971.

Between 1972 and 1975 there were no major procurements of USSR-built military hardware by India, and the Soviets were quite happy to keep India engaged (and simultaneously keep the PRC strategically encircled and contained) by offering sops like the bilateral rupee-rouble trading system (despite this, non-military trade was never a high point of India-USSR relations), supporting India’s indigenous space technology development projects, and continuing the off-the-shelf supply of weapons like MiG-21M/bis combat aircraft and Mi-8T utility helicopters. These geo-strategic imperatives, however, began undergoing a sea-change when the Indian National Congress led by the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi lost the 1976 general elections to the Janata Party. At around the same time, the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force were gearing up to undertake a gigantic, 10-year-long phased force modernisation effort that called for the procurement of big-ticket items like deep penetration strike aircraft (DPSA) and medium multi-role combat aircraft (M-MRCA); principal surface combatants like guided-missile frigates (FFG), guided-missile destroyers (DDG) and both single- and double-hulled diesel-electric submarines (SSK); main battle tanks (MBT) and infantry combat vehicles (ICV); mobile air defence artillery systems, 155mm/39-calibre towed field howitzers; attack and utility helicopters, plus tactical and strategic transport aircraft.

For obvious reasons, alarm bells must have started ringing in the Kremlin in 1978 when the Janata Party government led by the KGB’s bete noire (Prime Minister Morarji Desai) signed a contract with British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) for the purchase of 120 SEPECAT Jaguar IS/IM DPSAs. Next on the list were MBTs for which the Army had shortlisted contenders from France, Germany, and the UK; ICVs for which Army HQ wanted to evaluate French and German offers; the M-MRCA for which Dassault’s Mirage 2000 was the preferred choice, and single-hulled SSKs for which Kockums of Sweden and HDW of Germany were the preferred suppliers. What made matters far more complicated for the Kremlin was India’s attempt to normalise relations with the PRC in the post-Mao Tse-Tung era, while for Delhi the USSR’s inability to prevent Beijing from ‘teaching a lesson’ to Hanoi (by being unable to avert the Sino-Vietnam War of February-March 1979) revealed the true limits of Soviet politico-military power projection. And what was also not known then to India as well as the West was the USSR’s plan to undertake the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 1979 despite the steadily deteriorating economic situation of the Warsaw pact member-states. By 1980 the Warsaw Pact countries were collectively importing 110 million tonnes of crude oil to satisfy internal requirements even though the USSR was by then the world’s largest producer of crude oil and the second largest gold producer. What made matters far worse for Moscow were efforts made by the West led by Reagan Administration to irreversibly cripple the Soviet economy into a state of perpetual decline by forcing the USSR to increasingly to borrow from the West.

For the Kremlin, therefore, it must have come as enormous relief to see Mrs Gandhi being elected as Prime Minister for a third term. And this is where the mystery deepens and the ground gets murkier. For, despite the known limitations and decline of Moscow’s economic/military prowess, the MoD, without any fanfare, in May 1980, inked a $1.6 billion weapons procurement agreement with the USSR (at concessionary terms of 2.5% interest rate) and also followed Moscow in establishing diplomatic relations with the Vietnam-installed Cambodian government of Heng Samrin. This was followed by another gigantic contract signed in 1981 for procuring weapons worth $2.5 billion, followed by yet another contract in 1984 worth almost $3 billion, despite the latter two deals proving to be a heavy burden for the Indian economy, and becoming the main reason why India applied for a $5.65 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (when the USSR collapsed, New Delhi’s debt to Moscow was estimated at $16 billion, including interest, thanks to the rupee-rouble trading practice). As a consequence of all this, at least three major Indian force modernisation plans mutated to the following:
· Instead of the IAF acquiring a single M-MRCA, the requirement was broken down to an astonishing five aircraft types—49 Mirage 2000H/TH M-MRCAs were ordered in 1984, while 90 MiG-23BNs and 50 MiG-27Ms were imported off-the-shelf between 1981 and 1986 (and another 165 produced in-country between 1983 and 1997) to serve as tactical air support aircraft, and 40 MiG-23MFs and 50 MiG-29B-12s were procured in 1983 and 1986 directly from the USSR as dedicated air superiority combat aircraft. The clinching argument in favour of these procurements was then spelt out by the Soviets to a gullible MoD as: quantity has a quality of its own!
· Against all logic the Navy’s SSK procurements were broken up among two parties, with the single-hulled SSKs procured being the four Class/Type 209 from HDW, along with their advanced, prohibitively expensive licenced-fabrication facilities since 1982, while at the same time eight double-hulled Type 877EKM Kilo-class SSKs were procured off-the-shelf from the USSR. This led to avoidable and wasteful expenditures incurred for creating from scratch two parallel types of on-shore infrastructure for SSK training and maintenance.
· The Indian Army, which wanted to acquire a MBT incorporating hit-survivability design features (something that the home-grown Arjun Mk1’s design strongly signifies), from late-1982 became surprisingly reconciled to acquiring some 1,900 T-72M/M1s that incorporated hit-avoidance features. This despite the fact that by late 1980 when the Army conducted field trials of the T-72M it found out to its utter horror that basically, with the exception of the T-55, the overall Soviet approach to MBT design in the post-World War II era was found to be flawed on two major counts: namely, the gamble on not being hit rather than on surviving hits, and the refusal to perceive survivability of the tank crew as a quite distinct issue from survivability of the vehicle, with the former having priority over the latter. The combination of these two shortcomings produced design solutions such as the T-72M’s carousel autoloader and ammunition reserve being accommodated on the turret floor. This indeed allowed for a very compact configuration and ensured that the ammunition is less likely to take a direct hit—but it also entailed a very high risk of ignition or sympathetic detonation should the fighting compartment be penetrated, in which case there went the MBT and the crew with it. In fact, in mid-1982 in Lebanon the 105mm APFSDS rounds fired by Israeli Merkava Mk1 MBTs with 105mm rifled-bore guns routinely pierced the Syrian T-72M’s front glacis, went straight through the MBT and exited through the engine compartment, leaving a turretless hulk behind. The Indian Army got a first-hand demonstration of the T-72M’s acute vulnerability in October 1987 when LTTE guerrillas exploded improvised explosive devices underneath two T-72Ms deployed with 65 Armoured Regiment for Operation Pawan during the battle for Jaffna, which resulted in armour penetration and the ensuing catastrophic detonation of the MBT’s ammunition reserve (this being stored in a carousel autoloader on the turret’s floor), resulting in the turrets being blown off. Subsequent events in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm would convincingly highlight the T-72M’s totally flawed design features.

The rest, as they say, is history. The collapse of the Soviet Union reduced India’s military preparedness to a parlous state throughout the 1990s, thanks to the one-sided weapons procurement policies initiated in the early 1980s. The limited war in Kargil in 1999 and Operation Parakram in 2002 further highlighted the inadequacy of the country’s war-waging capabilities and block technological obsolescence of the armed forces. India today is totally dependent on Israel and France for ‘surgically upgrading’ the performance of almost all its weapons of Soviet origin. And Russia till today is unable to ensure the guaranteed supply of critical military spares because it no longer controls the various military-industrial facilities now spread out throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and the Central Asia Republics. The present UPA government led by the Congress (I), the very party that inked some of the highly questionable arms deals with the erstwhile USSR more than two decades ago, is eminently qualified to explain exactly what ‘enlightened national interests’ prompted the MoD to embark upon such a one-sided and disastrous defence procurement policy, even if it is for posterity. And the most qualified official to do so is none other than the present Minister for External Affairs, who was the Union Finance Minister during the 1980s.--Prasun K. Sengupta

ADDENDUM 2

Who Is The Real Enemy Of India?

Surprising as it may seem, the greatest threat to India’s national security interests has always been and continues to be the Government of India’s executive branch. The total lack of strategic visioning, consistently developing cold feet when it comes to enacting the much needed administrative and procedural reforms within the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and its Department of Defence Production & Supplies (DDPS), and politicising the procurement of weapon systems from abroad starting with the Bofors FH-77B towed howitzers have all had the most frustrating and terrible impacts on the force modernisation efforts of the country’s three armed services since 1988. Add to this the kind of vindictive politics now being practiced and one has the most poisonous cocktail ever concocted to make the armed forces the real and only losers. The most glaring example of such shameful and possibly treasonous conduct was evident in April 2004 when the then newly-elected UPA coalition government abruptly shelved the well-conceived Rs250 billion (US$5.3 billion) Defence Modernisation Fund (DMF) that was created by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA coalition government earlier in February 2004 for fast-tracking the long-overdue acquisition of critical military hardware. The fund was meant to be ‘non-lapsable’, meaning the MoD would not have to surrender its capital account funds if they were not used within the fiscal year they were allocated for. It was thus meant to reverse the trend of the past years, when the MoD returned on average more than $3.8 billion per annum to the national exchequer. However, the then Defence Minister (and presently the Minister for external Affairs) Pranab Mukherjee said on June 19, 2005 that such a concept was neither constitutionally nor legally valid, although he was subsequently contradicted by Prime Minister D Manmohan Singh, who said in April 2005 that he was not averse to the DMF being resurrected. When coupled with the ruling UPA government’s decision to examine all arms deals inked during the NDA government’s tenure for any traces of financial kickbacks, the lack of a consolidated DMF has had a paralytic impact on, among other things, the Army’s ambitious plans to re-equip its aviation, infantry, armoured, air defence artillery and field artillery formations, the Navy’s plans for acquiring deep-submergence rescue vessels, a fleet of intelligence-gathering vessels, and a DRDO-owned but Navy-operated fleet of telemetry tracking vessels. The following are but a few of the projects that have been put on hold since 2005, pending the outcome of CVC/CBI-led investigations into allegations of financial impropriety, reported manipulation of qualitative requirements (QR) to suit a particular vendor, to outright misrepresentation of the recorded conclusions of competitive field evaluations.

1) Recall the much hyped-about procurement of deep-submergence rescue vessels for the Indian Navy? Well, nothing has been inked so far as the CVC in 2007 put on hold the contract signature. The Indian Navy had selected the Remora 2000 remotely operated rescue vehicle (RORV) for its submarines by mid-2005, along with its launch-and-recovery system (LARS) and a fully integrated self-contained emergency life support system (ELSS) package, all to be supplied by Canada’s Ocean Works International of North Vancouver. The yet-to-be-signed contract, however, ran into rough weather two years ago amidst allegations of irregularities (i.e. kickbacks) during the contractual negotiations phase. The 20.6-tonne Remora 2000 RORV has a depth rating to 610 metres, can accommodate 18 men, can dry-transfer personnel under pressures up to 6 atmospheres into surface decompression facilities, and is designed for operations in Sea State 5 and transport in Sea State 6. The related surface decompression facility can treat more than 100 personnel. The entire Remora 2000 system can be air-transported for rapid deployment. Similar systems built by the same company are currently operational with the navies of Australia, Russia and Singapore.

2) What is known so far about the so-called ‘leaks’ (first revealed in May 2005) is that Navy officers posted in the Operations Directorate of Naval Headquarters were found trading off classified information of a commercial nature. What has not been revealed until now is that after the procurement costs of INS Vikramaditya, it is the cost of procuring a fleet of four 8,000-tonne intelligence-gathering vessels, and a DRDO-owned but Navy-operated fleet of three 15,000-tonne telemetry tracking vessels (each equipped with three monopulse radars capable of tracking the flight of multiple independent re-entry warheads) that constitutes the second biggest contract (in financial terms) to be awarded by the MoD for the Navy. But what makes the procurement of these types of vessels so lucrative is the sheer number of vendors involved—not just for supplying the vessels off-the-shelf—but for equipping them with more than 600 different systems and components, each of which are to be procured after intense competitive bidding under individual, supplemental multi-million dollar contracts. In essence, this is the dream contract that every ‘facilitator’ cherishes, and could potentially create more than 600 Indian multi-millionaires. Consequently, so great was the demand for access to the combined Navy/DRDO-drafted QRs for each of the 600+ systems that thumb-drives had to be employed for copying the QR files for onward dispatch to potential local and foreign vendors! Of the two types of naval vessels sought, the telemetry tracking vessels are of a strategic nature and there’s a pressing need for them simply because without them there’s no other credible way of tracking and validating the MIRV’s re-entry flightpath. Yes, you guessed right: thus far all test-firings of ballistic missiles carried out by the DRDO out of the ITR have involved only single re-entry warheads and until such time as India acquires such telemetry tracking vessels, the DRDO will be unable to test-fire MIRV-equipped ballistic missiles. Bu then again, the wait is likely to be a long one, as the procurement of such vessels is now on hold due to the on-going CVC/CBI investigations.

3) Another procurement that has been put on hold, again for reasons of alleged financial impropriety, is that concerning Swedish Space Corporation’s (SSC) supply of mission sensor suites for an initial three Dornier Do-228-211s of the Indian Coast Guard Service. SSC had won the competitive bidding process in mid-2007 for supplying the maritime surveillance system, each of which comprises an Ericsson-built SLAR (typically covering 18,000 km² per hour for oil spills and small objects on the water surface and 48,000 km² per hour for large vessels), and Argon ST (formerly Daedalus) 1221 IR/UV linescanner (operating in the 8.5-12.5µm region and in the 0.32-0.38 µm region and providing high-resolution imagery of oil spills and other features on the sea surface).

4) This may sound extremely depressing, but there’s a reason why the upgraded M-46S 155mm/45-calibre towed howitzers have gone missing from the Republic Day and Army Day parades since 2007. One may recall that in 1990, the Indian Army firmed up its plans for upgrading the 130mm M-46s and year later the MoD approved the plan, and SOLTAM Systems of Israel was selected as the prime contractor among five bidders. In-country field trials of the upgraded prototypes were carried out in 1993, but the MoD took another five years to sanction the funds. On paper, 430 upgraded M-46S 155mm/45-cal towed howitzers (for 20 Regiments) were to be supplied (since 2002) by the state-owned Ordnance Factories Board (OFB) under licence from Israel’s SOLTAM Systems, making the M-46S the Army’s tube artillery system with the longest reach, being able to fire ERFB-BB rounds out to 38.5km and VLAP rounds out to 42km when using bi-modular charges. The bad news is that the upgrade programme has been terminated after only 40 howitzers were modified, this being due to a fatal barrel explosion taking place two years ago. Army HQ has since then asked the MoD to terminate this project for good and efforts are now on to initiate legal proceedings against SOLTAM and seek liquidated damages.

5) Remember the big splash made in April 2007 when the MoD reportedly leaked news about the Eurocopter-built AS.350B3 Fennec winning the competitive bid for supplying the Army’s new-generation single-engined light observation-cum-utility helicopter? Well, the news is that this result was already known two years ago, when Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Eurocopter had inked a Global Industrial Cooperation Partnership Agreement in February 2005 to jointly produce Ecureuil and Fennec helicopters for the world market. Yet, Eurocopter’s rival, Bell Helicopters Textron, prudently decided to give the MoD the benefit of the doubt and took part in the in-country flight evaluations throughout 2006. But it got the shock of its life when in May 2007 the MoD invited Eurocopter for final contractual negotiations. And this happened even after the Fennec convincingly failed to perform as advertised during the ‘cold soak’ tests in January 2007 at Leh air base during which both competing helicopters’ engines had to be switched off overnight and re-started at high-altitude the following day. Apparently, the Bell 407 had no problem activating its engine with the help of the internally-mounted battery-operated starter-generator. But the AS.550B3 Fennec could not follow suit and it had to remain grounded for 48 hours, awaiting the arrival of an external ground power unit (GPU) from NOIDA. Consequently, fed up with the charade of flight-tests, Bell Helicopters has since decided for good measure not to take part in the subsequent round of competitive flight trials. Reportedly, Bell Helicopters now believes that HAL and Eurocopter are now hand-in-league to divide the MoD’s now inflated order for LOH/LUH helicopters (for all three armed services)—have the cake and eat it as well. Nothing else can explain how HAL can state that it will require a ridiculous timeframe of six years to develop a single-engined 3-tonne variant of the twin-engined 5.5-tonne Dhruv ALH! Thus, the stage is now set for other competitors like OBORONPROM (proposing the Kamov Ka-226) and AgustaWestland (offering the A-119LUH) to smell a rat and refuse to take part in the forthcoming competitive bidding process.--Prasun K. Sengupta