Why then is India squandering away its unique position in the international arms market today?

Unlike China which has no access to major defence suppliers in the US and western Europe and can buy arms only from Russia, New Delhi today can buy them from all the three. In playing the full field, India can extract the best possible terms from all the three.

If the Chinese Defence Minister, Chi Haotian, were to swap places with our own A.K. Antony, he would be leading and flaunting big

defencepurchase missions to the United States; because China knows how to grab a strategic lever when it sees one.

It is about time that the two national security advisers, Jones and M.K. Narayanan force the two bureaucracies to remove all the trivial obstacles to arms supply between the two countries. Yes, the arms supplies could flow in both directions, if Washington and New Delhi can encourage their private sector

corporations to find mutual complementarities in the defence industry just as

they discovered in the

IT field more than a

decade ago.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological

University, Singapore