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Chandigarh: India seems to have arrived at the rather remarkable conclusion that the answer to its enduring combat aircraft shortages, production delays and chronic engine-development failures is to keep expanding its portfolio of increasingly ambitious fighter programmes.

The latest – and possibly most ambitious – is its emerging interest in joining France’s sixth-generation Future Combat Air System (FCAS), that has been widely lauded by sections of the media and large numbers of officials and defence analysts.  

This comes as India continues to struggle with serial production of its indigenous fourth-generation Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA), prepares to acquire around 20 Rafale F4’s from France in fly-away condition and manufacture another 90-odd under the Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) programme, and attempts to locally develop its first 5th-generation stealth fighter under the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme.

Taken together, these programmes have taken India’s long-running fighter-development effort to a level of irony that would be difficult to invent as satire: it is, in effect, akin to adding new floors to a building whose foundations remain unfinished and decidedly shambolic.

The latest manifestation of this grand ambition is no longer merely conceptual, with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) recently informing the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence that it had “initiated efforts in a concerted manner” to join the French-led FCAS. The proposal had reportedly figured in discussions during Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s recent visit to France, after which the parliamentary panel urged the government to prepare a roadmap for acquiring sixth-generation fighter capabilities.

‘Surreal leap beyond what we can really support’

This prospective cooperation has emerged from the unravelling of the long-troubled Franco-German FCAS partnership, once envisaged as Europe’s premier future-fighter programme. Years of disputes over leadership, industrial responsibilities, technology sharing and intellectual property rights progressively weakened the arrangement. France consequently found itself in need of a credible industrial partner for its future combat-aircraft ambitions, while India saw an opportunity to gain access to technologies that could otherwise take decades and enormous resources to develop independently. 

At first glance, India’s........

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