He is middle-aged, wears Armani with diamond cufflinks, flashes a Breguet watch and prefers blondes. He loves to holiday in St. Tropez, flies only first class, owns yachts and a fleet of the most expensive cars. Meet India’s new-age suave arms dealer, who has successfully replaced the old, cigar-smoking retired armed forces officer as the agents of global defence companies in the Indian market.
The life of Indian arms dealers is best explained in a CBI chargesheet filed in 2006 in connection with the Scorpene deal. The agency uncovered that the whole backroom arms trade is beautifully crafted with lies and deceit mixed with wine and women. The middleman will play on all the vices of the powerful and the influential. Ironically, he would like to appear patriotic, naming his companies—Surakshit Bharat, Jai Hind and Strong India.
In a majority of cases, arms dealers represent global defence companies that are willing to shell out crores of rupees for jobs varying from changing the operational requirement of a particular tender to supervising the manipulation throughout the process. Many retired senior and junior officials with high bandwidth are hired by the arms dealers to maintain the growing “network” in South Block. All that these retired officers do is, use their old boy network—“batch mates”, “school types” and “same regiment” loyalties—to get insider information on the tenders and pass them on to the arms dealers.
As he walks in and out of the South Block and North Block, he reportedly chooses officials carefully to leave “a suitable” gift, mostly at their homes. The return gifts for these “kind gestures” are accepted at a later date and at times even demanded. In most cases, the present day arms dealer is already an insider in the business; he has taken over the “family business” from his former military officer-turned-businessman father, brother or uncle. Their world is a closed one with insiders guarding their territory like a pack of wolves, not letting a new-comer anywhere near their hunting ground. Thus the new entrants are left to begin as small fish and wade through the muddied water, evading competitors’ booby traps and mines all through, before they can make it big.
The clients of most small-time dealers are from the insurgency groups and armed outfits that wage war against the State. They begin in the business by supplying small arms and ammunition. They usually work as Indian representatives for big-time foreign agents, who are generally considered as India experts in the global market. Politically well-connected in India, the foreign middlemen usually ensure that the financial transactions are routed through tax havens such as Mauritius and Seychelles in the name of fake business contracts, so that the money trail is not tracked back.
The foreign agents are mostly from North American or European countries—Americans, Canadians, Swiss, Italians, Swedish, Russians, Ukranians and even French. And their operations match their
Indian counterparts, except that they play their game on a global stage.
As Hollywood star Nicolas Cage’s character Yuri Orlov in the movie Lord of War puts it: “There are three basic types of arms deal: White—being legal, black—being illegal, and my personal favourite colour—gray. Sometimes I made the deal so convoluted, it was hard for me to work out if they were on the level.”