India shuns US in $11bn fighter deal

India has shortlisted European jet fighters, in preference to US and Russian rivals, in a hotly contested $11bn competition to supply the Indian air force with advanced combat aircraft.

At stake is a deal to equip India with 126 multi-role fighter jets in one of the world’s largest military contracts. The winning bid is expected to shape India’s air power for the next three decades and serve as the bedrock of a strategic partnership.

After trials, India selected France’s Dassault Rafale and the multinational Eurofighter Typhoon – both currently operating over Libya – to compete in the next stage of the competition, according to India’s defence ministry. A spokesman told the Financial Times that a final decision would be taken within a year.

The move will be a blow to the US. Washington strongly lobbied India to buy its aircraft as payback for the landmark Indian-US civil nuclear deal in 2008. The agreement – brokered by Manmohan Singh, Indian premier, and then-US president George W. Bush – brought India’s nuclear programme out of decades of global isolation.

Timothy Roemer, US ambassador to Delhi, said the US was “deeply disappointed” by the decision not to select US defence companies. Earlier on Thursday, Mr Roemer, a personal friend of Barack Obama, US president, announced his resignation.

While Mr Roemer said he was leaving India for personal reasons, as ambassador he had heavily promoted the US bids. He said he had “accomplished all of the strategic objectives set forth two years ago” when he took the job.

Top Indian officials and politicians had indicated that they wished to buy US military hardware to improve a fast-warming relationship between the two democracies in the wake of the transformative nuclear deal.

The US had pitched Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet and Lockheed’s F-16 Super Viper against the Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault’s Rafale, Sweden’s Saab Gripen and Russia’s MiG-35.

Defence experts considered the US fighters to be less advanced than some of the competition. But rival bidders were worried that political clout from Washington would give US competitors an advantage. Saab was always considered an outsider but was thought to have a competitively priced bid. Meanwhile, the Russians had earlier secured a partnership with India to build a so-called fifth-generation stealth fighter.

Uday Bhaskar, a defence analyst, said that the jets had been assessed on technical grounds but the final decision could not be divorced from geopolitics. “There can be no doubt that the bilateral US-India relationship will be significantly influenced by this decision,” he said.

The Indian government has in recent months been hit by a series of damaging corruption scandals involving alleged political interference and the integrity of regulation. One consequence, analysts said, was a reluctance to introduce political wrangling into the fighter jet contract.

Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, said Washington would almost certainly try to press New Delhi to reconsider, as it did successfully in a bitter competition for advanced light helicopters several years ago.

Mr Varadarajan, however, said it would be “virtually impossible” for Mr Singh to override the air force technical evaluations. “He will not be able to manage the politics of cancelling this to mollify the Americans,” he said.