Finally. When the Indian government announced its intention to buy French Dassault Rafale fighter jets this month, it rung in the beginning of the end of a process that actually began in the late 1980s. At $10. 4 billion - and expected to grow further as price negotiations continue -the MMRCA deal is the biggest contract for a single weapon in the history of independent India. This new fighter is the marquee item in India's ambitious plans to spend $100 billion over the next five-to-seven years on new conventional weapons. But the Rafale is not a fighter that the world's air forces are rushing to acquire, so why is India? Indeed, the heavy, twin-engine Rafale is not the kind of aircraft the IAF wanted to replace its ageing MiGs with anyway. In 2010, with this fighter acquisition process still ongoing, Stephen P Cohen and I had argued in a book that India's military modernisation appeared to be bereft of military-strategic purpose.