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India, Russia Defense Ministers Meet Ahead of Putin Visit
By UTTARA CHOUDHRY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NEW DELHI
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov held talks Dec. 1 with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee, putting the accent squarely on defense ahead of a visit by Russia’s president to New Delhi.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits here Dec. 2 to shore up agreements on a range of bilateral issues including defense deals with its former Cold War ally India, officials said.
Despite ever-warming ties with the United States, Russia remains India’s main supplier of aircrafts, tanks and ships.
Putin’s three-day visit will mark the fifth Indo-Russian summit since 2000 and the first since the swearing-in of the Congress party government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in May.
Ivanov held back-to-back meetings Dec. 1 with India’s military top brass. He was received by Mukherjee and inspected a ceremonial guard of honor before India’s three service chiefs called on him.
“The meetings will tie up ways to expand military cooperation. Both sides see the immense potential for engaging in defense joint production and want to take it a logical step forward,” said a defense official.
Ivanov also met M. Natrajan, secretary of India’s military research and development wing. “These day-long meetings will be followed by delegation-level talks,” said the Indian official.
India and Russia have jointly developed the 280-kilometre (175-mile) range BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. It will arm Indian warships and has been tested six times since its development by Indian and Russian experts in 2001.
BrahMos was on display at the Jan. 26 Republic Day parade when India shows off its military hardware, and a number of countries are said to be interested in buying the cruise missile, which carries a conventional warhead.
India and Russia should sign an Intellectual Property Rights pact on systems produced jointly to pave the way for expanding military co-operation, the Press Trust of India news agency quoted Ivanov as saying.
“An early conclusion of such an agreement would lay the foundation for development of many more hi-tech weapons systems jointly by the two countries,” said Ivanov.
He said Russia wanted military ties with India “to transcend a buyer-seller relationship” to lead to jointly developing futuristic weapons.
A senior defence ministry official added New Delhi hoped an “unfinished agenda” would be resolved in Wednesday’s meetings. He was referring to Russia’s refusal to share frontline military technology with India until New Delhi endorses a pact on the protection of intellectual property rights.
Another issue is replacement parts. Seventy percent of India’s military hardware is of Soviet origin and since the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup, the army, navy and the air force have complained of delays in sourcing spares from debt-hit Russian armament plants.
“There are a lot of systems in our inventory which are Russian and we hope the Russian industry will give its full support to what we have from them,” Indian Navy Chief Admiral Arun Prakash said earlier this week.
Prakash, however, dismissed reports debt-ridden MiG Corp. could stumble in supplying 16 MiG29K jet fighters worth $700 million for a refurbished Soviet-era aircraft carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov, that India agreed to buy from Russia in January 2003.
India’s military is also seeking a breakthrough in stalled talks with Moscow to reach a tripartite pact with Israel for revamping India’s fleet of Tu-142 maritime surveillance aircraft that it bought from the Soviet Union in 1988.
Israel is India’s second-largest arms supplier.
Another key focus of Putin’s visit will be in information technology.
Putin is due to spend a day in the southern high-tech capital of Bangalore visiting big software firms.
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