Sub leak: Don't let it halt naval upgrade

“The leakages are being viewed seriously... they are a matter of much worry”
— Unnamed sources in the Indian Navy

The blandly reassuring statements attributed to the Indian naval establishment barely masks their collective sense of immense relief that the journalistic coup by the reporter of The Australian out of Sydney — of acquiring and serially publishing almost a compendium of classified data on the technical capabilities of the French Scorpene submarine, now under acquisition for the Indian Navy, occurred not in India, but in France. Apparently it came from sources inside the Direction des Construction Navales (DCNS), the French public sector consortium of shipbuilders that manufactures Scorpene. These came to light, whether by coincidence or happenstance, in the precise period when intense price negotiations were also in progress with another French public sector aerospace giant, Aviation Dassault, for the purchase of 36 Rafael fighters for the Indian Air Force.

Both DCNS and Aviation Dassault are major players in their respective industries. Also, they have been present in the Indian defence market for a long time. India’s defence market is known for murky deals. Indeed, under an earlier dispensation, the whole Scorpene deal might have resulted in DCNS being summarily “blacklisted” by the uber-moralistic defence minister of that time, whose sole worry seemed to be preserving his own “clean political image”, even if the entire defence modernisation process came to a complete halt. This must have come as manna from heaven for hostile intelligence services, who simply showered anonymous complaints to the defence ministry. They alleged graft in high places in the government and questionable business ethics of rival competitors. They succeeded substantially in slowing the pace of modernisation of the Indian armed forces to a crawl. In retrospect, was all this a deliberate campaign of information warfare? If so, it is noteworthy that this firestorm of motivated allegations rarely, if ever, singed anyone in the civilian bureaucracy who were the final decision-makers.

The recent massive security haemorrhage in the case of the “Scorpene documents” and their reverberations are likely to apply cautionary brakes on India’s defence preparedness. This comes at a time when media reports indicate China has decided to sell eight SSK (“hunter-killer”) diesel-electric submarines to Pakistan, probably of the Type-41 “Yuan” Class and possibly on “friendship” commercial terms. Submarines, whether conventionally or nuclear powered and armed, are generically considered strategic undersea weapons which operate by stealth, each category having their own capabilities and mission profiles. A submarine fleet constitutes one of the most essential components of all modern navies with “blue water” aspirations, in which submarines have always been high-value capital assets. The Indian Navy has historically given high priority to the development of its submarine fleet and has a workmanlike and admirably professional submarine sub-culture. Indian-built submarines are now coming afloat, armed with a variety of indigenously manufactured torpedoes, like the advanced heavyweight anti-submarine torpedo Varunastra and advanced light torpedo (TAL) Shyena, indigenous cruise missiles Brahmos designed with Russian help.

The development of India’s submarine fleet has been marred by some unfortunate blemishes too, like the tragic fire and explosion on Russian-built Kilo Class 877 EKM submarine Sindhurakshak on August 14, 2014, while it was berthed inside Mumbai harbour, which took a heavy toll of the crew. With the submarine come its torpedoes, expensive, high-technology subsurface anti-submarine guided weapon systems, whose costs and complexity often rival that of the parent submarine itself. In its nuclear missile capable SSBN version, submarines constitute the most fail-safe “third leg” of the classical nuclear triad. The current batch of six Scorpene submarines for the Navy are under various stages of construction and trials in this country and overseas. These have been designated as “Kalvari” class, after the lead vessel of the series, and carry the lineage of their decommissioned predecessors as required by Indian naval tradition.

Submarines are “hunter killers” designed to stalk and kill enemy subs, like the Agosta 204B in service in Pakistan, also designed by the same naval conglomerate as the Scorpene. General information on foreign-built subs in Indian and Pakistani service are available on the Internet, and don’t require much cloak and dagger espionage. India is one of the limited number of nations that have the industrial capability for building submarines in the public sector at Visakhapatnam and Kochi, now also with some larger shipbuilders in the private sector under the “Make in India” initiative. Security is now a major concern in all such installations, whether in the public or private sector.

The operational movements of submarines are ultra-secret, and the Indian Navy’s track record has suffered a severe blemish in the so-called “War Room Scandal” of 2006, where “top secret” operational information was allegedly smuggled out of the Navy’s War Room at Naval Headquarters by a renegade traitor and eventually found its way into enemy hands. It was a gigantic breach of India’s security fortress, and a major coup for hostile intelligence agencies. The recent transfer of security responsibility at the public sector Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers, Kolkata, to the Central Industrial Security Force  is an acknowledgement of this threat in port cities where shipbuilding dockyards are situated in crowded industrial areas that can often be communally and politically sensitive. India needs to speed up the indigenous manufacturing of modern state-of-the-art defence equipment, a matching aspect of which should be tightened security measures and controls at all defence manufacturing establishments, an increasing number of which are now in the private sector. The major lesson to be drawn from the Scorpene episode is, once again, the old one of preserving national security in a cultural and socio-politico environment which accepts bribery, corruption and even treachery as normal business processes.