UK response to losing India defence contract just not cricket

Terribly inappropriate it was for a British minister to use cricketing analogies when speaking of building a defence industry partnership with India.

Gerald Howarth's talking of "dot balls, bouncers and googlies" followed the adverse reaction by some British political leaders to India's opting for the Rafale jetfighter. Their response more typical of the notorious, beer-soaked, English football hooligans, than of the blokes with stiffer upper-lips in the pavilion at Lord's.

Sure, it is "legitimate" for the British to keep highlighting virtues of the Eurofighter Typhoon, but many of the comments favouring the scrapping of British aid to India indicate blatant overstepping of the crease: that too when an English court has ruled that no strings should be attached to aid.

A two-year-old comment of Pranab Mukherjee was resurrected, but that was not all. Also used as ammunition was India's poor track-record in addressing issues of mass poverty and deprivation, corruption in high places, and to crown it all allegedly excessive and wasteful defence expenditure. No, that would not have been money down the drain had it flowed into the coffers of the consortium producing the Typhoon in which the Brits are a partner.

Similarly, there would have been no other complaints had their rivals on the other side of the channel not got the nod. Ah, but then centuries earlier the British East India Company had confined the French to just a few pockets on the subcontinent: how dare the "natives" now defy the crown?

Conveniently forgotten has been the British-origin Jaguar being built under licence in India, so too the Hawk AJT - which, incidentally, was preferred over the French Alphajet - and a host of military sales from Britain to India over the past 60 years. Not to mention the "dumping" of unwanted helicopters for civil applications. In comparison, French sales have been "peanuts", to use the term the Indian finance minister did to quantify British aid to India.

It is a sign of Indian maturity that some political counter-punching apart, the defence establishment has not sought to match British hysteria. There have been no calls to scrap ongoing projects, blacklisting of British firms from future deals etc. What the Brits are reluctant to accept is that the "threat" to the Typhoon - certainly further development/upgrade of the weapons-delivery platform - comes not from India buying French but the huge slash in the British defence budget. But bad losers ever cry "foul".