India's Finance Minister badly needs a lesson in diplomacy. Pranab Mukherjee insulted Britain by describing their 280 million pound aid every year as nothing more than “peanuts” and said that he and other Indian ministers tried to reject the aid last year but the British government ‘begged’ them to take it. India now finds it offensive to be perceived as a poor country and figures show that their economy is booming and could well overtake Britain’s in the next ten years.
So why did Britain give India one billion pounds of aid over the last five years? Could it have been a sweetener for them to look favourably on buying their Eurofighter Typhoon jet? They must have been bitterly disappointed by the news last week that French firm Dassault Rafale was selected to supply 126 military jets to the Indian air force. The British bid by BAE Systems Typhoon came in at second choice. But here’s the kicker – British aid is 15 times larger than the eighteen million pounds France gave India in 2009.
The French slashed its price to ensure the deal was done and it worked a treat - Indian officials said that the Dassault’s Rafale jet ‘was much cheaper than the Eurofighter’.
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