India is not really over-spending on arms, say New Delhi analysts. Besides, the neighbours are belligerent.
The obscure district of Purulia in the rural backwaters of West Bengal had its day in the sun as 1995 drew to a close. A creaky Antonov-26 cargo aircraft with a motley crew from the former Soviet Republics flew in over Bihar and dropped a weighty cache of guns and grenades over fields and shrubland, surprising a sleepy village and sending the Indian civil and military establishment into a tizzy over the effortless invasion of national air space.
The incident was readymade for pontification by think tank pundits, and in an ominously worded piece in the Asian Age daily, former Director of the Intelligence Bureau M.K. Narayan warned of "what is possibly a well-planned and internationally-directed transfer of arms to pockets of turbulence in Asia and Africa from countries with surplus weaponry…"
That might or might not be the case, but just about a month later, all hell broke loose on the India-Pakistan border after a rocket landed in a mosque in the Pakistani border village of Kahuta, killing 22 civilians. Islamabad said the Indians had fired the rocket, while New Delhi disowned responsibility and suggested that it was misfired by the Pakistani side while attempting to disrupt the Republic Day celebrations across the frontier.