Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on April 11 said the government cannot compel Indian armed forces to buy indigenous weapons. Interesting, Defence Minister opened a major defence exhibition that projects “India — the biggest global arms importer — as one of the major defence manufacturing hubs in the world.The theme for ”The four-day DefExpo India, is “Emerging Defence Manufacturing Hub. The 10th in the biennial exercise aims at establishing Brand India and highlighting the manufacturing capabilities of the country’s public and private sectors. Asked about the huge export-import gap in the defence sector of a country that does not even figure among the top 25 exporters of arms and reluctance of its forces to buy locally manufactured weapon systems and use, Sitharaman said she could only tell the Indian armed forces to procure from indigenous companies “as much as possible”. She could not cross a “thin line” to impinge on the freedom of the Indian Army, the Indian Air Force or the Indian Navy “to make their own decisions” as per their operational requirements.

How Nirmalaji or all concerned with manufacturing and using justify this sort of reasoning and thereafter expecting other country to buy our equipment? We would have been wasting so much money of public exchequer to organise such expensive exhibition for years, if either the local manufacturers or Institutes fails to convince the armed forces to use them and the chiefs of defences forces can’t participate in developing and leading in using the machines, weapons, or ammunition…Over the years that mindset has kept us as slave to the creations of advanced nations.

It is because the Americans respected our software engineers and their products that made India known as intelligent people in eyes of the world. Left to the bureaucracy and babus, they would also have not GSTN or Aadhar. What a shame!Neither Japanese, nor Chinese have any such problem.