Supreme Court: NDA Government (BJP) Gets Clean Chit In Rafale Deal

Supreme Court: NDA Government (BJP) Gets Clean Chit In Rafale Deal: Verdict Details, Highlights

Supreme Court has given a clean chit to PM Narendra Modi led NDA Government for the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter Jets from France.

The Supreme Court comprised three Judge bench headed by Ranjan Gogoi, find nothing wrong on the purchase of 36 fighter jet instead of 126 from France.

The Supreme Court gave clean chit on three aspects -

Purchasing of 36 Rafale jets instead of 126

Pricing of Rafale jets

Selection of Indian offset partners.

The litigation had questioned the deal on the ground of pricing mechanism, commercial favoritism, and procurement of less number of fighter jets. The petition was first filed by Advocate M L Sharma. The petitioners demanded CBI to register an FIR for the said irregularities in the deal.

.The apex court rule has two main points:

It finds no evidence of commercial favoritism

It is not the job of the court to deal with comparative pricing mechanism.

About Rafale Deal

Dassault Rafale won the MMRCA competition in January 2012 to supply 126 Jet aircraft with additional 63 aircraft to Indian Air Force.

First, 18 aircraft were to be supplied by Dassault and remaining were to be manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. Dassault refused to ensure the quality of aircraft produced by HAL.

In 2014 the price of deal increased to $30 billion. This created the price issue on the deal and deal couldn’t be signed. Then after Modi government, the deal was confirmed with the 36 multirole fighter aircraft of Rs. 58000 crores from France’s Dassault Aviation. The deal has been in controversy since its inception and supreme finally gave a clean chit to the government.