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By:

Kedar Kulkarni

28 May 2026 at 5:09:28 am

72 Hours in May: India’s Defence Ecosystem Comes of Age

Last month saw three major indigenous defence breakthroughs in three days, underscoring India’s growing ability to build strategic technologies at home. AI generated image For most of its post-independence history, India’s strategic establishment has had a peculiar relationship with military power. Major acquisitions were announced in press conferences. Sophisticated platforms were purchased abroad. The long years of design work, testing and technological development often occurred out of...

72 Hours in May: India’s Defence Ecosystem Comes of Age

Last month saw three major indigenous defence breakthroughs in three days, underscoring India’s growing ability to build strategic technologies at home. AI generated image For most of its post-independence history, India’s strategic establishment has had a peculiar relationship with military power. Major acquisitions were announced in press conferences. Sophisticated platforms were purchased abroad. The long years of design work, testing and technological development often occurred out of public view, frequently in partnership with a Soviet and later Russian supplier, and were judged only by results that emerged decades later. India’s defence story, for much of that history, was one of patient procurement. In recent years, it has begun to look rather different. Significant Milestones Between May 7 and May 9, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) conducted three separate tests of three distinct technologies. While any one of them would ordinarily have commanded headlines of its own, the tests were three significant milestones in a span of seventy-two hours. On May 7, off the Odisha coast, an Indian Air Force Jaguar dropped a 500-kilogram bomb fitted with what the Ministry of Defence calls India’s first indigenous glide weapon system, the Tactical Advanced Range Augmentation kit, or TARA. The technology is deceptively modest. It converts conventional unguided bombs already held in large numbers by the Air Force into stand-off, precision-guided munitions, reducing dependence on imported systems such as the Israeli SPICE-2000 and moving India closer to the capability long provided by America’s JDAM family of kits. A day later, from the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Island, India conducted a successful flight trial of an Advanced Agni missile equipped with a Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) system. The Ministry stated that multiple payloads were delivered to distinct targets distributed across a wide area of the Indian Ocean. While the missile variant has not been formally identified, defence reporting has suggested it may be the long-anticipated Agni-VI. Whatever its nomenclature, the test marked a significant progression beyond Mission Divyastra of March 2024, which first demonstrated India’s MIRV capability. Then, on May 9 in Hyderabad, DRDO’s Defence Research and Development Laboratory successfully ran a full-scale scramjet combustor continuously for more than 1,200 seconds. Twenty minutes of sustained supersonic combustion may sound esoteric, but it represents one of the essential building blocks of a future hypersonic cruise missile. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh described the achievement as laying “a solid foundation” for India’s Hypersonic Cruise Missile Development Programme. Viewed individually, none of these tests fundamentally alters the strategic balance. India had already demonstrated MIRV technology. It had previously conducted a full-scale scramjet burn. Stand-off precision munitions have been under development for years. What is new is the clustering. The timing falls within a particularly significant calendar in India’s recent strategic history. Roughly a year earlier, during the first week of May 2025, India launched Operation Sindoor against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan. For the first time, indigenous systems including BrahMos missiles, domestic air-defence networks and a growing inventory of Indian precision weapons were employed at scale under combat conditions. Since then, the Indian government has repeatedly framed Sindoor not merely as a military operation but as a symbol of India’s political, social and strategic will. The coincidence of these three tests with the operation’s anniversary is hardly accidental. The tests also occurred amid a more complicated geopolitical backdrop. Over the past year, New Delhi has grappled with renewed tensions with Washington over tariffs, Russian oil imports and the continuing shadow of potential CAATSA-related sanctions. For decades, Russia supplied many of India's most important military platforms, from Sukhoi fighters and T-90 tanks to S-400 systems and the jointly developed BrahMos missile. Recent geopolitical turbulence has served as a reminder that excessive dependence on any single supplier carries strategic risks. Against that backdrop, the scramjet milestone deserves particularly close attention. Nearly every major Indian hypersonic headline of the past two decades has been BrahMos-derived, which is to say it has rested on technology co-developed with Moscow's NPO Mashinostroyeniya. The combustor that ran for twenty minutes in Hyderabad, by contrast, is a Defence Research and Development Laboratory design, fuelled by indigenous hydrocarbon chemistry and supported by industry partners drawn from India's domestic supply chain. It is the first major brick in India’s hypersonic wall laid without a Russian hand on the trowel. The BrahMos-II programme, originally conceived as a Russian-assisted hypersonic successor, has reportedly progressed more slowly than anticipated owing to cost and developmental challenges. Increasingly, the architecture being pursued by DRDO appears to be the one now undergoing testing in Hyderabad. The strategic significance is difficult to overstate. For the first time, India is developing a critical-path hypersonic capability whose progress cannot be halted, delayed or conditioned by a foreign partner. Industrial Backbone India’s defence production crossed Rs. 1.51 lakh crore in 2024-25, an all-time high and an increase of 18 percent over the previous year. Defence exports reached Rs. 23,622 crore, more than thirty times their level a decade earlier, while nearly 16,000 micro, small and medium enterprises now participate in the country's defence manufacturing ecosystem. Behind those figures lies a series of policy interventions whose effects are only now becoming visible. Programmes such as Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX), the ADITI initiative and the Defence Industrial Corridors in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have sought to connect laboratories, start-ups, private manufacturers and the armed forces into a single innovation ecosystem. The BrahMos Integration and Testing Facility in Lucknow, inaugurated in 2025, has become a particularly visible symbol of this transformation. The objective is to build increasingly sophisticated technologies within the country itself. The TARA glide kit offers a useful example. Developed by Research Centre Imarat in Hyderabad through the Development-cum-Production Partner model, it brings together DRDO laboratories and private-sector manufacturing. The Advanced Agni programme similarly rests upon a network of indigenous suppliers specialising in metallurgy, guidance systems, electronics and rocketry. The scramjet combustor, meanwhile, was designed by DRDL and realised through domestic industrial partnerships. Progress Without Illusion None of this is to exaggerate India’s current position. The TARA kit arrives years after comparable Western systems entered service. The Advanced Agni's warhead count and effective range remain undisclosed. The scramjet achievement, impressive as it is, still remains a ground test. China and Russia already field operational hypersonic weapons, while the United States has begun deploying its own. So, while the gap remains real, the significance of the seventy-two hours between May 7 and May 9 lies in what the cluster reveals about the state of India’s defence-industrial base. Three indigenous systems, spanning precision-strike capability, strategic deterrence and future hypersonic warfare, reached important milestones within days of one another. They emerged from different laboratories and drew upon different industrial networks. Yet all reflected that India’s strategic technology ecosystem has reached a level of maturity at which meaningful advances increasingly emerge on its own timetable. The message is directed not only at Beijing and Islamabad, but also at Washington and Moscow. India’s strategic capabilities will continue to benefit from international partnerships. But the country’s most consequential military technologies are increasingly being designed, tested and produced at home. When Rajnath Singh flagged off the first batch of Indian-built BrahMos missiles in Lucknow in October last year, he observed that India had moved into the role of “a giver, not just a taker.” The phrase was intended to describe defence exports. So, while the era of patient procurement is not exactly over, it certainly is no longer the whole story. (The writer is Assistant Professor at the Ajeenkya D.Y. Patil University and a doctoral scholar in geopolitics. Views personal.)

India waits to lasso diamantaire Mehul Choksi

Mumbai: India rubbed its hands gleefully as the Belgium Police honoured its request to arrest the absconder diamantaire Mehul Chinubhai Choksi – more than seven years after he, along with his nephew Nirav Deepak Modi - allegedly duped the Punjab National Bank of nearly Rs. 13,800-crores.

 

The scam involving the ‘Mehul Mama-Nirav Bhanja’ erupted in Jan 2018, after the PNB lodged a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

 

By then the kin, along with many of their family members, winked and slipped out of the country, leaving a rattled India rubbing its palms in disappointment.

 

A political-cum-financial storm raged, embarrassing the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year before the Lok Sabha elections.

 

Multiple agencies launched a multi-pronged probe into what became the biggest banking scam in the past quarter century – and almost four times bigger than the stock market-cum-banking fraud the late Big Bull Harshad Mehta had inflicted on the Indian economy 33 years ago (in April 1992) – when it was just opening up.

 

In Belgium

According to official reports, Choksi was living with his Belgium citizen-wife Preeti in Antwerp, a global diamond hub, presumably for the past 18 months on a ‘residency permit’ acquired through questionable means, for medical reasons.

 

Earlier, he shot to the headers (June 2021) while being taken in a wheelchair to a court by the Dominican Republic's Police on charges of sneaking into the small country in the Caribbean Sea, North America.

 

Interestingly, as the Antigua & Barbuda government initiated the process to cancel his citizenship acquired through an investor visa, Choksi had suddenly gone ‘missing’ till he surfaced in the Dominican Republic.

 

The April 2025 action by Belgium followed a request by India’s CBI and the financial frauds specialist Enforcement Directorate (ED) to nab Choksi as the InterPol had revoked his Red Corner Notice in 2023.

 

Mama and Bhanja

‘Mama’ Choksi is the founder-owner of Gitanjali Group while ‘bhanja’ Nirav’s Firestar plus other companies – and the duo, with some PNB officials hand-in-glove – conspired to make a ‘mamu’ of not only PNB, but other banks, as it subsequently tumbled out.

 

After making a quiet exit, Choksi was detected living in the verdant Antigua & Barbuda Isles (West Indies), then attempted entry to the Dominican Republic, was sent back to Antigua & Barbuda and then went to Belgium where he was nabbed on Sunday.

 

Similarly, Modi was found sauntering on the streets of London and nabbed in March 2019. He remains in jail there since India's extradition is still pending.

 

However, India is keeping its fingers crossed that it may finally lay hands on Choksi, bring him to India and face trial in the PNB scam, though it may take time.

 

Born in Mumbai (1959) and educated in Gujarat, Choksi, 66, and wife Preeti have three children.

 

The Rs. 13,800-crore PNB scam

In the modus operandi revealed after India’s second-largest PSU bank PNB admitted it was scammed, Choksi and Modi used fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) to get overseas credits or loans from Indian banks.

 

The PNB first informed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) of the fraud and then lodged a criminal complaint with the CBI in Jan. 2018, plus another CBI complaint in Feb, that led to a FIR against Modi and Choksi and their companies.

 

The ED entered the scene to probe the allegations of money-laundering through the LoUs – which they allegedly misused to avail short-term business finances from foreign branches of Indian banks.

 

The probe said that the duo were availing the LoUs from the PNB’s Brady House Branch from March 2011, and over the next six-seven years, managed to get a whopping 1,200-plus LoUs like a breeze with the help of some friendly bankers within.

 

Post-scam, the gold-diamond companies Gitanjali Group and Firestone Group with multiple operations in India and abroad have largely wound up, while some personal assets of the mama-bhanja have been auctioned to recover a part of the dues.

 

ED's plea to declare Choksi fugitive stuck for seven years

Even as absconding diamantaire Mehul Choksi, a key accused in the Punjab National Bank loan fraud case, has been arrested in Belgium, the ED's plea to declare him a fugitive economic offender has been pending before a court in Mumbai for nearly seven years.


Choksi, 65, and his nephew diamantaire Nirav Modi are the prime accused in the Rs 13,000 crore PNB bank loan fraud case. Choksi was arrested in Belgium following an extradition request by Indian probe agencies, official sources said on Monday.


The Enforcement Directorate had filed the application in July 2018, seeking to declare Choksi an FEO and confiscate his assets under provisions of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act.


However, the matter has witnessed repeated delays owing to a barrage of applications filed by the accused in the PMLA court and the Bombay High Court alleging procedural lapses in the Enforcement Directorate's plea.


"The court is kept busy with frivolous applications, and hearing on our application to declare him (Choksi) an FEO has been adjourned for the past seven years,” an ED officer had said after the hearing was once again deferred this February.


"The court should have continued the hearing and taken a decision on the future course of action once the application was moved," the officer had said.

He had urged the court to take note of the repeated filing of similar applications and to not entertain them.


Choksi's lawyer had informed the court that the accused was undergoing treatment for suspected cancer in Belgium and intended to file an application in connection with his health.


Under the FEO Act, an individual can be declared a Fugitive Economic Offender if a warrant has been issued against him for an offence involving Rs 100 crore or more and he has left India while refusing to return. Once declared an FEO, the person's property can be confiscated by the investigating agency.


Choksi had challenged the ED's application in the Bombay High Court, alleging that the agency "had not followed proper procedure before filing the application and, hence, it stands vitiated".


However, in September 2023, the High Court dismissed his plea, ruling that the ED had adhered to the prescribed format under the FEO Act. It also vacated a stay on the special court's proceedings.


Despite this, the hearing on declaring Choksi FEO could not commence, with Choksi continuing to file applications before the special court through his lawyers.


While most of these pleas have been dismissed, a few remain pending. His latest attempt to stall proceedings through a plea to recall the notice issued on the ED's FEO application was rejected in December 2023.


According to ED officials, Choksi left India under suspicious circumstances in early January 2018.


Shifting stance

Choksi's counsel has argued that the ED kept shifting its stance on the material grounds for declaring him an FEO and that the suspension of his Indian passport made it impossible for him to return for investigation.

The court, however, rejected this argument, stating that the notice was issued based on accurate information and not based on "wrong facts or mistaken assumptions".


ED claimed the accused left the country under suspicious circumstances in the first week of January 2018.


Nirav Modi has already been declared as an FEO by the special court. He has been lodged in jail in London since 2019.

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