If all goes well for French arms manufacturer DCN, it would be building Scorpene submarines for Indian Navy and a submarine for Pakistan.
NEW DELHI: If all goes well for French arms manufacturer DCN, it would be building Scorpene submarines for the Indian Navy and a new-generation submarine for Pakistan, side by side in the same shipyard.
This scenario has caused alarm in the Indian security establishment, which is looking at ways to convey its concern to France as President Jacques Chirac arrives in New Delhi on Sunday evening for a three-day visit. Though the navy is reluctant to go on record, a senior officer said, “We will put forth our concerns.”
DCN’s audacity in approaching the Pakistan Navy and offering a new generation of submarines within months of sealing the Rs13,000 crore Scorpene deal with India has not gone down well with New Delhi.
Defence experts are keenly watching the upcoming visit of a Pakistani naval delegation, led by an admiral-rank officer, to the DCN shipyard at Cherbourg, where work on the Scorpenes has begun.
The navy says there is not much it can do in the matter as both are “commercial deals” and cannot be prevented on any technical grounds. But it says it is “unethical” of DCN to have approached Pakistan so soon after closing the deal with India, and hopes Paris will prevent it from closing the deal.
But such hopes may not amount to much. Uttam Datt, a Delhi high court advocate specialising in commercial litigation, said, “An exclusivity clause is very common in all commercial negotiations, more so in this kind of a contract, where the whole objective is to get superiority over your adversary. That advantage is lost if your adversary gets access to the same equipment.”
Datt said that unless he saw the contract, he would not be able to comment on the success of the navy’s negotiators in inserting an exclusivity clause. “But on the face of it, the navy could have technically stopped DCN from supplying similar kind of machines to Pakistan at least for some time,” he said.
DCN is no stranger to Pakistan, having supplied three Agosta 90B submarines to the country under a contract signed in 1994.
The first of the Agosta class submarines was built in the same Cherbourg shipyard. The remaining two were being assembled in Karachi when 11 French engineers working on the project were killed in a terrorist attack in May 2002.
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