New Delhi: The Russia-Ukraine and West Asia wars have accelerated a global push towards self-reliance in arms manufacturing, driving increased funding into defence startups worldwide. And India is no exception.
Global media takes note of India’s latest interest and sustained investment in defence, especially against the backdrop of the 3-day conflict with Pakistan last year.
“Over the weekend, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about turning India from the largest arms importer in the world (after Ukraine) to a major defence manufacturer,” writes Krishn Kaushik in Financial Times‘ India newsletter. Modi, as Kaushik notes, added that India cannot be reduced to a “marketplace” for the world.
The report further highlights how the Indian government, led by Modi, is keen to make defence manufacturing a key engine in India’s growth story. While defence accounts for less than 16 percent of the GDP, Modi wants to boost it to 25 percent, FT notes.
The newsletter also cites a Morgan Stanley report which shows that India has the fourth largest military expenditure in the world.
“Indian companies produced weapons worth almost $19bn in the fiscal year to March, a 15.6 percent growth over the previous year. India wants to almost double defence manufacturing by the end of the decade,” Kaushik writes.
However, even now, the majority of the output is produced by government-owned companies. “While most of the arms made domestically are for the nearly 1.5 mn military personnel, New Delhi has slowly, and starting from a minuscule base, started to export weapons to markets in south-east Asia and Africa, among others. It sold weapons worth $4 bn in the year up to March,” says Kaushik.
‘Rajnath Singh chided HAL for delays’
The government is also irritated with the sluggishness of production of its own companies. “Defence minister Rajnath Singh recently chided Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for the delays in delivering the Tejas Mk1A light combat aircraft to the air force,” FT reports.
However, a push towards privately-owned companies manufacturing arms is visible. While the government opened up the sector a decade ago, private players’ share had gone up to 24 percent till last year. “This has created a burgeoning number of start-ups in deep-tech and drone manufacturing that have caught the fancy of venture capital and family offices.”
Meanwhile, in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman examines the growing anxiety among US allies about their reliance on Washington. Some are seeking greater strategic autonomy, if not a complete break from the US. But is that even feasible? China may have found an answer.
‘US partners frustrated’
“Washington’s traditional partners have discovered that longstanding ties to the US do not buy them immunity from abuse and pressure tactics from the Trump administration,” Rachman writes. His remarks are important in the context of the US President Donald Trump’s tariff war against its rivals and allies alike. Trump’s exchanges with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy regarding the war with Russia have not been noted by the media as pleasant.
And this frustration with the Trump administration found its voice in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who recently said that Trump treats democratic allies worse than authoritarian rivals, Rachman writes.
“In this new atmosphere, close ties to America that were once seen as a strength increasingly look like a potential vulnerability.” The most recent area where three allies are seeking greater sovereignty is AI. Trump triggered fresh alarm this month by deciding to limit all foreign nationals’ access to Anthropic’s frontier AI models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5.
The point, one that Europe was quick to recognise, is that an entire industry would be run by a technology that US could decide to turn off. “Spooked by this prospect, European governments are increasingly talking about the need for “AI sovereignty”—reducing their reliance on US companies and models.”
Rachman notes that this precarity is neither restricted to AI, nor to Europe. India serves as a good example. “Tariffs on India and Trump’s tryst with Pakistan have gone down very badly in Delhi. The Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think-tank that often reflects government thinking, recently published a paper arguing that ‘the Trump factor’ had weighed heavily in India’s decision to buy fighter planes from France,” Rachman writes.
While all countries are seeking to reduce their dependence on the US, they do not wish to be completely cut out of anything. Rachman says that to compete with the US’ off-switch uncertainty, countries must find their own off-switches, just like China has. “The Xi government responded to extremely high American tariffs by severely restricting the export of critical minerals. It was an effective tactic that forced the US to reduce tariffs,” he notes.
“For India, it could be the country’s crucial role as a producer of generic pharmaceuticals. For Canada, it could be the potash that is a critical ingredient for the fertilisers that American farms depend on. For Europe, it could be the unique technologies supplied by the Dutch company ASML or Europe’s role as an exporter of uranium and turbines.”
Brutal gang rape in Bihar’s Begusarai
A horrific incident in Bihar has revived memories of the 2012 gang rape that made national headlines, sparked global outrage, and triggered some of the largest protests ever seen in the national capital.
“The 28-year-old mother of four young children told BBC Hindi that she was attacked in her own home and gang-raped by a group of men who allegedly inserted objects into her vagina,” Geeta Pandey and Seetu Tiwari of the BBC report.
The incident that took place on 11 June gained national attention, BBC reports, after hospital officials confirmed that objects had to be removed from the survivor’s vagina. “She also brought a bullet casing, which she said was one of the items used,” the report says.
Recounting the horrific assault, the survivor said she was using the toilet outside her one-room home late at night when five men forced their way in. The toilet had no door and a curtain was the only barrier providing a semblance of privacy.
“They stripped me, gagged me, and tied my hands. When I tried to fight back, they slashed my chest with a blade and raped me,” she told the BBC.
The woman, while delivering her account to BBC, also mentioned how no proper medical care was made available to her following the incident. Her husband, an e-rickshaw driver, reportedly took his unconscious wife to a police station about 3 km from their home. He alleged that the police refused to register a complaint and instead turned them away, advising him to take her to a doctor.
“On the night of the attack, she was reportedly turned away by a nearby private clinic, which said it did not handle emergencies and had no doctor on duty. She was then taken to a government community health centre, where she received first aid before being referred to a district hospital,” the report says.
After the case attracted national attention, protesters have come forward to say: “We have learnt no lessons,” referring to the 2012 gang rape.
One protester added, “Such cases keep happening because the message has not percolated down to every last corner of India that rape can get them capital punishment. Fear has not been instilled in society.”
Of the three named and two unidentified suspects, the police have arrested two, the BBC reports.
Unlikely city rescues Delhi’s intellectual refugees
Delhi’s intellectual crowd is thinning under political pressures from the powers that be, says a piece in The Economist.
“For centuries, Delhi attracted scholars, saints and statesmen hoping to influence the ruler of the day. Once India achieved Independence, it was the natural place for the fledgling state to locate national institutions such as archives and universities. Publishers and think-tanks soon followed. The sheer density of serious thinkers makes Delhi the intellectual capital of India,” the column says.
Since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, the space for creative expression, freedom of speech, and free thinking has shrunk dramatically, the column adds. “Chiefs of public universities were replaced with more pliant figures. Private universities and non-profits came next. Authors of inconvenient papers lost their jobs.”
So where did Delhi’s “intellectual refugees” head off to? Surprise, suprise. It’s Ahmedabad.
“Ahmedabad? The sole metropolis of Gujarat, a state ruled by the BJP for nearly three decades, a dozen of those by Mr Modi himself? The municipality where the party won 83 percent seats in recent local elections? The city that routinely tops lists of India’s most segregated by religion? Where Muslims live in one of India’s largest ghettos? Where the right of public assembly was repeatedly curtailed for ten years until a recent court ruling? Where vegetarianism rules and alcohol is prohibited? That Ahmedabad?” the surprise of the author is not unfounded.
The Economist went to the city to talk to some such intellectual refugees. “There is high freedom within their institutions, though with the understanding that they will keep suitably low public profiles.”
Ahmedabad has never fully shed the shadow of its alleged image as the epicentre of the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots that scarred both Gujarat’s reputation and that of Narendra Modi. Yet the city also boasts a much older legacy of progressive thinking among its mercantile elite, the column notes.
“Industrialists from the city bankrolled Mahatma Gandhi’s social reforms. Supposedly cultureless capitalists established public museums to house their collections. In the 1950s, a group of textile barons invited Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French modernist architect, to build them homes, offices and a cultural centre. Many of the city’s private schools and universities were founded and are still run by members of the business class.”
The column concludes that there is more to the city than Islamophobia and vegetarianism.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
Also read: Iran-US peace talks have come at a critical time for India, writes global media