In 1958, China started publishing maps showing a road traversing Aksai Chin connecting Xinjiang to Tibet. A year later came the Tibetan uprising and we gave political asylum to the Dalai Lama. When china pushed us too far, we began the forward policy. And it went all wrong, resulting in a unilateral withdrawal of china after they gave us a bloody nose. India's brave frontline troops, some who fought to the last bullet or the last man, were sitting in isolated outposts, armed with the Lee Enfield. 303 bolt action repeating rifle of pre-world war 2 vintage. It was first used in the second Boer war. Mao's red army had machine pistols. Now imagine, even before the Sino Indian war of 1962, the MIG 21 was already a 3 year old plane. They soviets stopped building it the year i was born, that's 1985. Yet hundreds of what we now call the flying coffin are still part of our already under strength air force. We bought a few Sukhois and that's it. We're so woefully out of date in our air force that it's scary. It should be. No one, not even the congress, would or is saying that we don't need the Rafale aircraft. We need it badly, desperately even. But politics is telling us another story. India's defence deals have been so sordid in the past, and then many just assume that there is corruption or something dodgy going on. Today Rahul Gandhi has directly accused the PM of corruption. What proof he has of that other than bombast and innuendo, we don't know. The NDA's counter has been to have the Defence Minister as we speak in France, shoring up any doubt that the deal is something for India or france to be cagey about, they're celebrating the deal as a bilateral triumph if anything else. So amid all this political gamesmanship and perception games, how do we downright ensure that we just get the planes? That's the conversation tonight, let's have it.