Aakar Patel

This is not a simple narrative but a complex one. At the heart of it, the Rafale story is about why India paid 40 per cent more for equipment whose price had been settled. But it carries within a multitude of other problematic things. Why did the government of India, and in fact the prime minister personally, take up for renegotiation that which was already settled? Why, unusually for this government, was there pushback from the bureaucrats, whether in the defence ministry or the production facility at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), and how was it managed inside?