Delhi’s defence summits produce the same spectacle every year: big numbers, bigger adjectives, and a stage full of people congratulating each other. This year’s NDTV Defence Summit followed the pattern. The Defence Minister said India is working toward sixth-generation fighter jets and planning for the warfare of the next 10 to 25 years, and that the country wants to define technology rather than merely import it. It is a fine ambition. But an ambition is not a capability, and India’s gap between the two is getting harder to hide.
A sixth-generation dream on a fifth-generation gap
India has no fifth-generation fighter in service. What the summit offered instead were timelines, with first-flight dates announced for the Tejas Mk-2 and the AMCA. That is a schedule, not an aircraft. Talking up sixth-generation jets while the fifth-generation programme is still on paper is selling a horizon to the public. Indian programmes have a long record of slipping, from the Tejas to the Kaveri engine, and each delay leaves the air force flying ageing fleets and waiting on foreign suppliers.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s air force has been reported to be approving the purchase of 40 fifth-generation stealth fighters from China. Beijing is not waiting for a summit to make announcements.
“Define, don’t import” from one of the world’s biggest importers
The pledge to stop importing technology sits awkwardly beside the facts. India has been one of the world’s largest arms importers for years. Its front-line fleet is a patchwork of Russian, French and increasingly American platforms, and its indigenous fighter has depended on foreign engines. Self-reliance is a slogan on the stage and a shopping list in the ministry. The phrase “rise without rupture” and the claim that India belongs to no geopolitical binary sound like strategic autonomy. In practice they describe a country that buys from everyone because it cannot yet build for itself.
The admission that deserved more attention
The most revealing moment of last year’s summit was not a promise but a confession. Lt Gen Rahul R Singh disclosed that China gave Pakistan real-time intelligence on Indian deployments during the conflict, saying Pakistan was getting live inputs of Indian positions from China. Consider what that means. India’s own senior officers say the adversary could watch Indian movements live through a superpower’s eyes, yet the public story remained one of triumph. New Delhi has never given a full accounting of what it lost in the air, or why.
The structural picture is no more flattering. Analysts noted that India flew three different types of fighters and has fewer airborne early-warning aircraft, a disadvantage in a short, sharp engagement. China has sold Pakistan $8.2 billion in arms since 2015, and Pakistan is its top customer. Pakistan built a networked system with a committed backer while India spoke of being a “civilizational power.”
AI as a buzzword
The summit was full of talk about AI and “cognitive warfare.” Adani Defence’s CEO described it as the fusion of human and machine intelligence. Nobody serious doubts that AI matters. But the gap between conference vocabulary and procurement reality is wide. Acquisition remains slow and opaque, and the drone and electronic-warfare lessons of recent conflicts are still being absorbed. Repeating “AI-driven autonomous systems” does not put them in the field.
Whose summit is it?
There is also an uncomfortable question about who frames the national defence conversation. A summit hosted by an Adani-owned channel, with the head of Adani Defence on the programme, blurs the line between public interest and private business. When a media house, a conglomerate and the ministry share one stage, the audience gets a curated story. Critical questions about costs, delays, losses and dependence rarely make it into the frame.
The real test
Strength is measured in aircraft that fly, engines that work, and intelligence that is not being read by your rival’s patron. It is not measured in applause lines. A country that wants to lead the next generation of warfare should first show it can field the current one, tell its citizens the truth about its last conflict, and build the industrial base that makes “define, don’t import” more than a slogan.
Until then, the summit’s biggest takeaway is one its organisers did not intend: India’s rhetoric about tomorrow is doing a lot of work to cover the problems of today.
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