Man of integrity takes on Indias defence
Manohar Parrikar has taken on the task of India's defence minister with gusto, writes senior columnist Ashok Malik exclusively for 'India Investment Journal'. As India's defence minister, Manohar Parrikar has a multiplicity of tasks before him, a menu more challenging than that on offer to many recent predecessors. A BJP veteran and popular chief minister in the coastal state of Goa, Parrikar, 61 this year, was requested to move to Delhi in November 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's search for a defence minister yielded no suitable options in the capital. Between May and November 2014, in the early months of the BJP-led government, Arun Jaitley had doubled as finance and defence minister but that was not sustainable. Modi had a tough mandate for his defence minister. First, clean up the procurement mess - confused, riddled with inconsistencies and bureaucracies, prone to corruption and tailor-made for delay. It would take a tough, decisive and honest defence minister to slice through the red tape and actually finalise transactions. It would also take a man of integrity to fight off pressure from defence agents, lobbyists and contractors who have had a happy home in Delhi for decades. Second, give India's Defence ministry some strategic heft. Too often has the ministry been reduced to a department for military purchases, assessing quality benchmarks, finalising contracts and so on. It has rarely had time for strategic planning and thinking on India' defence future and the shape of its external engagement in the 21st century. This is particularly important as the Indian Ocean and the maritime domain in India's near-neighbourhood are among the most militarily important and contested regions in the international system. Parrikar has gone about his task with gusto. He has pushed for contracts for domestic manufacturers, keeping quality standards sacrosanct, which could of course entail collaborations with global companies. He has formalised the induction of the domestically-produced Tejas, the light combat aircraft in development for some three decades. Several lobbies have argued the Tejas is not good enough and have sought to sabotage it. Parrikar contended that taxpayer money has been sunk into building the Tejas and it needed to be given a chance. Parrikar is now moving towards finalising a modern and enlightened procurement policy and sensible, rather than knee-jerk, blacklisting and punitive norms. In all of this, he is a vast improvement on his predecessor, A.K. Antony of the Congress. Antony is a personally incorruptible and well-regarded politician, but was completely indecisive and a prisoner of immovable forces in the Defence ministry. On strategy too, Parrikar is gradually changing the culture of the Defence ministry. He attended the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore this summer, a forum his predecessor had carefully avoided. Parrikar spoke on “Managing Military Competition in Asia”, largely addressing the maritime domain. He is travelling to the United States in August, his second visit to the country, and is likely to oversee the closure of a logistics agreement between the two militaries. Many of these are steps delayed by years, the years when Parrikar was not defence minister. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, one of India's leading engineering schools, Parrikar is different from other career politicians in that he has a technocratic training. His conversations with boffins and defence scientists are said to be interrogative and genuinely curious, as opposed to just general. No wonder he's both admired and feared in his office.
