There is something increasingly disturbing about how the Indian media, with rare exceptions, has covered defence issues in recent years, with much of the reporting abandoning scrutiny in favour of cheerleading and celebrating the very institutions it is bound to hold to account.In fact, so ecstatic is much of the print and electronic media at almost every announcement concerning defence acquisitions, indigenous materiel development, or claimed military achievements, that questioning their substance, deficiencies, or even feasibility has become almost an aberration.More troublingly, over the past decade, questioning official claims or drawing attention to failures within the armed forces and the wider defence apparatus has too readily been branded anti-national, disloyal or even inimical to national security, amid the increasingly triumphalist national-security rhetoric of successive Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led governments.Official claims in this regard are too often accepted at face value, projected capabilities treated as fact and routine announcements hailed as evidence of progress. The harder questions – what has actually been delivered, what remains deficient, what is dependent on foreign technology, what has been delayed and who is accountable, amongst others – are conspicuously left unasked.In mature democracies – which India rightly prides itself on being – the fourth estate routinely performs a watchdog function alongside formal government oversight mechanisms, subjecting military claims, procurement failures, cost overruns, capability shortfalls and institutional lapses to sustained public scrutiny.A serious defence press does not merely report what the military or government says; it interrogates it, tests it against evidence and pursues the consequences when promises are not fulfilled. It also does not simply wait for parliamentary committees or government audit bodies to identify failures; it independently follows the money, questions official claims and pursues shortcomings, long after official reports have been tabled in Parliament.Adding to the erosion of such independent scrutiny is the disappearance of veteran journalists who understood military affairs, knew the system from the inside and were prepared to ask questions that senior officers and bureaucrats found distinctly uncomfortable. They have increasingly been replaced on the defence beat by wide-eyed newbies, many of whom appear more captivated by the military establishment than curious about it, and whose limited understanding of service matters is frequently exposed by the credulity and superlatives of their reporting.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Some reporters and columnists who persisted in questioning official claims have consequently left these media outlets in frustration, after facing incessant queries and demands for explanations from within their own organisations and being made to justify legitimate scrutiny, as though they themselves had committed a professional transgression.But the pressures on such independent reporting do not originate solely within news organisations; they are reinforced by the increasingly cosy relationship between the respective service public relations organisations and sections of the defence press. A PRO’s institutional role is, by definition, to present his or her service in the best possible light, highlight its achievements and protect its public image. Consequently, when that objective intersects with a media culture increasingly reluctant to challenge the institutions it reports about, the outcome is a symbiosis in which both sides reinforce the same favourable narrative, rather than testing or challenging it.Over time, this mutually convenient ecosystem has also turned continued reporter access to the military establishment into a kind of currency, making critical questioning an inconvenience. A reporter who relies on such proximity to military authority can, understandably, become reluctant to jeopardise that relationship by asking awkward questions, challenging an inflated claim or pursuing an institutional failure to its conclusion.This is not to suggest that every reporter or PRO is complicit; yet, the cumulative effect is difficult to ignore. But so conditioned, psyched or simply enthralled by the armed forces has much of the defence press become that it sometimes appears there is almost nothing the military apparatus – whether the services, the Ministry of Defence or indeed the central government – can do that warrants sustained questioning and critique.Atmosphere of fear surrounding public discourse on the militaryA handful of senior armed forces veterans, including some former service chiefs, do occasionally voice their concerns in media commentaries over questionable government policies, decisions and practices relating to defence and national security. Yet, the impact of their criticism is largely blunted by the atmosphere of fear and trepidation surrounding public discourse on the military and related matters since 2014, reinforced by the present governments muscular national-security policies and a relentless chorus of superlatives surrounding almost every aspect of security affairs.These few critical veteran voices, however, are also frequently drowned out by a phalanx of other retired military officers, who have become fixtures on television news channels, routinely echoing official positions with unquestioning certainty and presenting a picture in which India’s military preparedness, modernisation and strategic posture appear to be progressing unimpeded. These armchair warriors parrot the same reassuring lines ad nauseam, reducing complex military questions to patriotic soundbites, leaving little room for inconvenient realities.It was not always so. In the halcyon days of a far more assertive and influential Indian media, the defence beat produced investigations that shook governments and forced uncomfortable questions into the national conversation. The Bofors affair in the late 1980s – over the purchase of Swedish FH-77B 155-mm howitzers – became one of independent India’s defining political scandals. Decades later came the controversy over the procurement of Czech-made Tatra military trucks, followed in 2012-13 by the AgustaWestland VVIP helicopter affair involving the proposed acquisition of 12 AW101 helicopters.Whatever the eventual legal or political outcomes of these cases, they demonstrated something that increasingly seems forgotten: defence journalism could once expose uncomfortable facts, challenge official versions, pursue documents and intermediaries, and keep a story alive until institutions were compelled to respond. Those days, however, increasingly belong to the past. The difference is not that defence scandals have disappeared; it is that the appetite, persistence and institutional space to uncover and pursue them appear to have diminished dramatically.Meanwhile, what traditionally passes for detailed scrutiny of the armed forces and the defence establishment in India is too often left to occasional reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), Parliamentary Standing Committees on Defence or the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).But, even these formal oversight mechanisms have, over the years, become increasingly feeble, with many of their reports declining in depth, rigour and originality, and their findings often becoming predictable and banal rather than penetrating examinations of systemic failure. Accordingly, their scrutiny carries far less force than it once did, but despite that, their findings are frequently reported cursorily by the media, reduced to a day’s headline, before disappearing beneath the next superlative official announcement.“Such a state of affairs is particularly difficult to justify when the defence budget runs into several lakh crores each year” said a retired three-star Indian Navy (IN) officer, declining to be named. Such expenditure, he stated, does not merely require scrutiny, but renders it an obligation. Every rupee spent on defence is public money, and the armed forces and the MoD should therefore expect – rather than resent – searching questions about how it is being spent, what it delivers and where it falls short, he added.Amit Cowshish, former MoD advisor on acquisitions, concurs.He argues that the watchdog function, which should be exercised jointly by government oversight bodies and an inquisitive and alert press, has become ‘woefully weak’, with the latter failing to perform its share of the task. Even when institutional scrutiny does occasionally occur, newspapers and broadcasters too often end up merely reporting the findings rather than pursuing the issues they expose, he observed. “When such oversight is absent, there is remarkably little independent journalistic effort to fill the void, leaving serious inadequacies to pass largely unexamined”, he bemoaned.When the media is reluctant to examineThis is particularly striking with regard to Atmanirbharta, the central plank of the government’s defence-industrial policy of increasingly sourcing its materiel requirements domestically. While this policy has undoubtedly accelerated indigenous defence equipment production and encouraged greater domestic participation in manufacturing, much of the public narrative surrounding it tends to equate local production or assembly with genuine technological self-reliance.There is, of course, little doubt that India’s defence industrial base (DIB) has made significant progress over the past seven decades, and that many indigenous platforms and systems represent genuine technological achievements. But much of the media coverage of this aspect seems remarkably reluctant to examine what lies beneath the label “indigenous”: a platform assembled, designed or substantially manufactured in India does not necessarily mean that its critical technologies are indigenous, as many supposedly atamnirbhar weapon systems continue to depend on imported engines, sensors, electronics, armaments, transmissions as well as other vital components.Yet this distinction is rarely pursued with anything approaching the persistence it deserves. And, nowhere is this contradiction more glaring than in propulsion – the fundamental technological foundation of military mobility and one of the clearest tests of genuine self-reliance for a country like India that increasingly presents itself as a major defence power.After decades of research, massive investment and repeated declarations of technological self-sufficiency, India has still not produced an indigenous powerplant for either a combat aircraft, main battle tank, infantry combat vehicle, self-propelled artillery, major warships or even military trucks. India can, no doubt, design sophisticated platforms, assemble them domestically and increasingly manufacture large portions of them, but when it comes to the propulsion that makes these platforms fly, move, or sail, dependence on foreign technology remains hopelessly complete.The ongoing and strategically consequential saga of India’s reliance on US-origin General Electric fighter engines has demanded sustained investigative reporting, but has received remarkably little.The GE F404-IN20 powers the Tejas Mk1 and its Mk1A variant, while the more powerful F414-INS6 is intended for the Tejas Mk2 and the initial versions of India’s ambitious fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme, for both the Indian Air Force and aircraft carrier deck-based versions, for the IN.But the F404 programme has been dogged by delivery problems, while the F414 has become embroiled in disputes over cost, technology transfer, intellectual property issues and the broad terms of local manufacture. For the more advanced AMCA variants, India is simultaneously exploring alternatives involving France’s Safran and Britain’s Rolls-Royce, both offering routes to co-develop or manufacture higher-thrust combat engines in India.The sheer incongruity of this bizarre situation scarcely seems to register in much of the media coverage regarding the AMCA. But one recent news report, went so far as to discuss the possibility of the AMCA emerging as a relatively inexpensive fighter for prospective customers in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.Onus on the press is not simply to report what is announcedSuch enthusiasm might be understandable once the aircraft had a settled engine, a mature design, an operational track record and an established production line. But with those prerequisites still years away – if the programme ultimately materialises as envisaged at all- talk of exporting the AMCA is not merely premature, but surreal, bordering on the ludicrous. But, this is precisely the sort of projection that a loyalist press is increasingly willing to reproduce as fact, however fanciful.For a country spending more than $90 billion annually on defence – making India the world’s fifth-largest military spender – the paucity of serious media scrutiny is not merely inadequate journalism but represents a failure of the press’s essential ombudsperson-like role. When so much public money and national security ride on these decisions, the onus on the press is not simply to report what is announced, but to question what is promised, establish what is delivered and expose what is not.Anything less, reduces the defence beat to little more than stenography – recording what happens without asking why, how or with what consequences.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.