India’s military modernisation effort is a road riddled with depressions and disappointments, a path so full of dark irony and paradoxes, it would send the most optimistic among us to a padded room, screaming into buckets of cold water. In the middle of this gloomy lake swirls India’s effort to modernise its Army’s basic firearms. After years of unspeakably poor planning on standard issue infantry weapons, a troublingly out-of-touch procurement ethic and an obsession with imports, in comes the latest tragicomic chapter.
American firearms company Sig Sauer Inc. announced yesterday that it had received an additional order from the Indian Army for 73,000 more SIG716 G2 Patrol assault/battlefield rifles. This is in addition to 72,400 similar rifles that were ordered in February 2019. With this, the Indian Army will operate 1,45,400 SIG716 rifles. You can read about that procurement here.
The procurement is only the latest in what has been seen as a lop-sided, confused infantry weapons procurement ethic that simply refuses to settle down into a sensible rhythm that draws from very capable new local sources of such weaponry, but continues to grease foreign suppliers like the United States and Russia. The first 35,000-strong batch of India-assembled Russian Kalashnikov AK-203 assault rifles rolled out of their troubled factory in northern India earlier this year, after years of uncertainty and delay. This factory alone will pump out hundreds of thousands of such rifles for the Indian Army’s infantry.
On the sidelines of this ludicrous obsession with importing even basic firearms, undoubtedly a slap in the face of any vaunted self-reliance dreams, stands India’s private sector, a sector that has spent the last decade literally begging the Indian military system for attention and a chance to field Made-in-India weapons for frontline duties.
In the wake of the newly announced Indian Army order for American SIG716 rifles, the CEO of one of India’s foremost private firearms developers and manufacturers, the Bengaluru-based SSS Defence, dropped an unusually outspoken comment on his social media, one that cuts to the bone, and signals a sharp departure from the otherwise quiet, submissive nature of the contracting game. Readers of Livefist who’ve seen our coverage over years of the good and bad of Indian defence procurement will see many echoes in the words of SSS Defence CEO Vivek Krishnan.
He starts by saying, “Been bombarded with messages since y’day seeking “my” opinion on the follow on acquisition of SIG 716i by the Indian army. Well, we knew this was coming. So, just went about our work. But some plainspeak is well worth it.”
Krishnan isn’t talking out the sides of his mouth, as you will see. His company edged out Israeli competition to win a contract to upgrade the Indian Army’s AK-47 assault rifles in 2021. You can read about that here.
“I wish the govt had not acquired more of these. A private solicitation and insistence on Indian design and content would’ve easily thrown up a contender or many in fact. Testing the same against the in service system would’ve been rather easy,” says Krishnan.
“Now that it’s done, what can we do right. Most others would disband. Not us. We made a decision a long while ago to be the most fearless dog in this business. We shall still have a weapon for each caliber and the user to us is still the man in uniform. We will be global,” fumes Krishnan.
The irony here is clear. SSS Defence, which has struggled to supply its firearms to the Indian MoD and military, has managed to bag export orders to several security agencies around the world.
“What about Make in India for defence ? There are a handful of guys really doing good work in the small arms space. There’s commitment from them and all it’ll take is patience. With our neighbourhood, only a fool can imagine doing without indigenous weapons. They’ll have to come and buy from us,” he says.
Krishnan’s company decided a few years ago to put its money where its mouth is and create (from the ground up) a weapon to take on the standard AK-47 type weapon in use with the Indian Army. You can read all about that here.
And here comes the real plainspeak, words that go like a scalpel into the dead skin of infantry procurement in this country.
“What about pride in Indian stuff ? We lost that pride a long while ago by building sub standard weapons in the govt controlled space. If anything, the private sector is regaining some of the pride. But making good weapons & getting them accepted is a difficult task. We know since going global has taught us that. In any case, we brown skinned Indians have always found that we’re respected by our own global peers before the country wakes up 😂. It’s a self esteem thing,” he says.
Ouch.
In one last flourish, Krishnan throws a challenge to the Indian military that he has thrown many times before. It is not a challenge thrown in defiance, but one seeking parity and fairness, where the endgame can literally only be a win-win for the Indian Army:
“One last bit. Here’s the challenge – we’ve heard from the buyer for a long time that “we’re not there on metallurgy” or “our designs are behind time”. I say put an indigenous weapon of ours against a global benchmark in each caliber and test out. Make the results open like real serious armies do. Test protocols are clearly defined. It would be the best for both sides. How difficult is that?“
How difficult is that, indeed.