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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.)

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Mamata is seeing a ghost of Bangladesh behind the massive outrage and waves of protest over rape and murder of the trainee doctor. And the reasons are many.

It’s been over a fortnight. Yet with each passing day the voice of protest is getting louder and stronger. From the streets of Kolkata it’s pouring into roads of hinterland. The cry for justice for a rape victim has consolidated into a wail of demands to set a lot of wrongdoings right. Here in lies the fear and trepidation. Wasn’t the issue that brought the youth of Bangladesh out on the thoroughfares a simple, innocent one of quota reform?

The chief minister of Bengal, known for understanding the pulse of people better than many, was quick to read the signages floating in the political horizon.

The most obvious reason for her to be tensed is that both the regime change in Bangladesh and the mass protest in Bengal, were student-driven to begin with. The two incidents---end of 15 year old Sheikh Hasina government and turbulence in West Bengal, over the heinous crime, falling back to back, the first on August 5th and the latter from August 9th onwards, give natural scope for comparisons. More so, because in both the cases the movement strayed beyond an affected constituency to include aggrieved people at large, cutting across socio-economic demography. If the quota reform protest started by students in Bangladesh became a mass uprising against an autocratic regime, the campaign demanding justice for the rape victim and overall safety and security of women in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal soon snowballed into a movement of no-confidence against the government. Slogans--”Mamata must resign” also got floated in social media much in line with the call for ouster of Sheikh Hasina. In fact “Resignation of Hasina” became the single point agenda into which all other fringe demands coalesced.

Incidentally, even before people started drawing parallels, that there could be a thread of commonality in the way the upheaval in Bangladesh and Bengal played out, Mamata was quick to point out that the Opposition were trying to pull off a Bangladesh by politicizing the tragic incident: “A coordinated approach has been executed by the BJP and the CPIM with support from the Centre to defame Bengal and exploit the situation....They want to make a Bangladesh here. They are taking cues from student unrest in Bangladesh and are attempting to capture similarly. I have no longing for the chair. I came here to serve people.”

Not only Mamata, her political lieutenants are consistently equating the turmoil in Bengal with the mayhem in Bangladesh. Cabinet minister for North Bengal development Udayan Guha threatened to take stern action against those, who would be trying to exploit the situation by emulating a Bangladesh like movement. “ Even after the hospital was vandalised, the police did not open fire on anyone. The police will not allow a Bangladesh type situation. We will not allow Bengal to turn into Bangladesh, Guha thundered.

Is the government’s fear unfounded?

Apart from the similarities on ground zero, as to how and where the future course of events are heading to, there are ample reasons for Bengal to mull on-- as to what led to a Bangladesh like boiling point. To begin with, it’ll be appropriate to talk of Bangladesh and the prevailing situation, that made the students’ protest become big in magnitude. The students were out on the streets because of a high reservation in public jobs. Unemployment and stagnant job market in private sector coupled with a high rate of inflation drove the educated youth to rebel against the government.

But soon the students found enormous number of sympathisers, who were equally at the receiving end. According to Bangladesh citizens, the last two terms of the Sheikh Hasina government were a mockery of democracy. Even elections would be compromised. As Hasina grew from strength to strength, she politicized institutions. The rank and file of police owed allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Extortion, harrassment and raids by police and people in power became rampant. An atmosphere of fear and repression reigned and people got restless to overthrow the government.

Politicization of institutions has been happening in Mamata government too. Allegations are quite strong that police in Bengal functions at the beck and call of political bosses. The lapses and alleged loopholes on the part of police in handling the rape and murder of the young doctor have yet again revealed a sense of confused or misplaced loyalty.

But above everything else both Hasina and Mamata governments allegedly seem to have twined in accepting corruption as a way of life. In Bangladesh jobs of primary and secondary teachers got sold at premium, Rs 10-12 lakh in the Hasina regime. Even police had to pay up for prized postings and transfers. In Bengal busting of the teacher’s recruitment scam has revealed how unsuccessful and ineligible candidates got government jobs in schools in exchange of bribes.

Similarities are multiple and inescapable. Mamata has good reasons to be apprehensive. It’s not only she, who can see and connect the dots. People, out on the streets, clamoring for justice, can see a providential pattern somewhere in the unfolding of future events in these two places-- Bangladesh and Bengal. True, they share more than 2,217 odd km of border. They share the same umbilical cord, other than language, culture, ethos, icons. Even emotions are the same. So she cannot take any risk.

(The writer is a senior jounalist based in Kolkata. Views personal)

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