“Rafale Storm Hits India-France Ties, IAF Unhappy With Rafales”?

Defence affairs - prakash nanda (from indian perspective)

India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, is reportedly planning to visit France next week. One of the principal objectives of his visit is said to remove doubts, if any, in the minds of the third countries about the depth of the strategic partnership between India and France in general and the faith in the quality of the Rafale fighters in particular. 

Apparently, both India and France have been disturbed by the systematic targeted attack through misinformation and disinformation by Pakistan and China that India’s air power is considerably weaker because of the much-hyped French-made Rafale fighter, which is nothing before the wrath of the Chinese-made J-10.

Ever since India’s aerial strike deep inside Pakistan on May 7 to neutralize the Islamabad-sponsored terrorists, Pakistan has been spreading the narrative that India lost three Rafale fighters when countered by Chinese J-10 with Chinese-made PL-15 missiles that Pakistan was supplied with. This narrative has been amplified by Chinese social media users, including those on TikTok.

The Pakistani and Chinese social media have even gone beyond this narrative to create cracks in the India-France strategic partnership through the dissemination of fake news, claiming that India now has a serious dispute with the French aerospace company Dassault Aviation. So much so that a French technical team is said to have requested an inspection of the Rafale fleet stationed in India to assess possible technical issues, but New Delhi has declined the request, citing national security concerns.

“This unfolding controversy not only casts doubt on the Rafale’s battlefield credibility but also threatens to strain diplomatic and defense ties between India and France”, one Pakistani report said on June 6.

Incidentally, the Indian government has not made any public statements so far regarding the loss of any Rafale. Although Western reports, which initially bought into Pakistani claims of the loss of six Indian fighter jets, including three Rafales, are now suggesting the possibility of only one Rafale being shot down. Pakistan has never been able to back its claims with concrete evidence.

As far as France is concerned, at a press conference in Paris, a spokesperson for the French defence ministry said that “what I mainly observe is that we are in the fog of war and that there is an intense information war. In other words, what we know most of all today is that we don’t know what happened. So indeed, there are a number of allegations that I will not repeat, since there is no confirmed information.

“The issue of the Rafale is, of course, of primary importance to us. We are naturally keen to understand what happened, and so we are trying to stay as close as possible to our Indian partner to better understand the situation”.

Significantly, the spokesman added, “ What we can especially note today is that the Rafale has seen 20 years of operational use – 20 years of combat deployment – and that if it turns out there was indeed a loss, it would be the first combat loss of this warplane.”