India’s foreign minister, S Jaishankar, is reportedly planning to visit France next week. One of the principal objectives of his visit is said to remove doubts, if any, in the minds of the third countries about the depth of the strategic partnership between India and France in general and the faith in the quality of the Rafale fighters in particular.
Apparently, both India and France have been disturbed by the systematic targeted attack through misinformation and disinformation by Pakistan and China that India’s air power is considerably weaker because of the much-hyped French-made Rafale fighter, which is nothing before the wrath of the Chinese-made J-10.
Ever since India’s aerial strike deep inside Pakistan on May 7 to neutralize the Islamabad-sponsored terrorists, Pakistan has been spreading the narrative that India lost three Rafale fighters when countered by Chinese J-10 with Chinese-made PL-15 missiles that Pakistan was supplied with. This narrative has been amplified by Chinese social media users, including those on TikTok.
The Pakistani and Chinese social media have even gone beyond this narrative to create cracks in the India-France strategic partnership through the dissemination of fake news, claiming that India now has a serious dispute with the French aerospace company Dassault Aviation. So much so that a French technical team is said to have requested an inspection of the Rafale fleet stationed in India to assess possible technical issues, but New Delhi has declined the request, citing national security concerns.
“This unfolding controversy not only casts doubt on the Rafale’s battlefield credibility but also threatens to strain diplomatic and defense ties between India and France”, one Pakistani report said on June 6.
Incidentally, the Indian government has not made any public statements so far regarding the loss of any Rafale. Although Western reports, which initially bought into Pakistani claims of the loss of six Indian fighter jets, including three Rafales, are now suggesting the possibility of only one Rafale being shot down. Pakistan has never been able to back its claims with concrete evidence.
As far as France is concerned, at a press conference in Paris, a spokesperson for the French defence ministry said that “what I mainly observe is that we are in the fog of war and that there is an intense information war. In other words, what we know most of all today is that we don’t know what happened. So indeed, there are a number of allegations that I will not repeat, since there is no confirmed information.
“The issue of the Rafale is, of course, of primary importance to us. We are naturally keen to understand what happened, and so we are trying to stay as close as possible to our Indian partner to better understand the situation”.
Significantly, the spokesman added, “ What we can especially note today is that the Rafale has seen 20 years of operational use – 20 years of combat deployment – and that if it turns out there was indeed a loss, it would be the first combat loss of this warplane.”
Incidentally, Marc Chavent, a member of the French Parliament, has asked the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs to address the strategic and industrial implications of the reported loss of the Rafale.
“Several open and specialized sources—including American analysts and intelligence data from NATO partners—confirm the loss of at least one Indian Rafale, shot down by a PL-15E missile launched from a Pakistani J-10C, equipped with the KLJ-10A AESA radar,” Chavent wrote.
Chavent also raised concerns about the Rafale’s defensive systems. “The SPECTRA electronic warfare system apparently neither detected nor disrupted an attack emitted in spectra that are now standard for low probability of intercept (LPI) radars,” Chavent said, questioning whether France risks seeing “both the technological advantage of the Rafale and the industrial leadership of its aerospace defence base called into question.”
The SPECTRA electronic warfare system on Rafale jets provides advanced threat detection, jamming, and decoy capabilities to protect the aircraft from radar-guided and infrared-guided threats.
The French lawmaker further asked the government to clarify whether the new Rafale F5 standard will feature a “substantial overhaul of the SPECTRA system, adapted to the new generations of AESA radars and active guidance missiles”.
He also asked whether France is considering developing a dedicated “Rafale EW” version, inspired by the US Navy’s EA-18G Growler, for SEAD/DEAD (Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses) missions.
“This reaction becomes all the more urgent given that Chinese 5th generation platforms, such as the J-20 and potentially the FC-31, could be rapidly deployed in the Indo-Pacific region, introducing a capability leap in terms of stealth, sensor fusion, electronic warfare, and multi-domain interoperability,” Chavent added.
The French government is yet to respond publicly to Chavent’s inquiry.
It is worth noting that India has 36 Rafales, which are 4.5-generation multirole fighter jets. These were delivered between 2019 and 2022. And in April 2025, India signed a new deal to acquire 26 Rafale Marine jets—a naval variant of the aircraft—for the Indian Navy. These jets will be deployed on INS Vikrant and future aircraft carriers, allowing India to project air power in the Indian Ocean and beyond.
India and France have also agreed that the Rafale acquisition will involve technology transfer, support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” program, and collaboration on defense manufacturing. As a result, several Indian defence firms and HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) have begun working on the local production of certain parts and maintenance systems for the Rafale.
Significantly in this regard, Dassault Aviation, the manufacturer of the Rafale, and India’s Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL) have announced on June 6 landmark production transfer agreements that could mark a crucial step toward fulfilling the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) future requirement of 114 multi-role fighters that are to be made in India.
The Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) program of the Indian Air Force, potentially worth over $25 billion, has contenders including the Rafale, Sweden’s Gripen-E, Lockheed Martin’s F-21, Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Russian Sukhoi Su-35.
The Dassault-TASL deal includes four production transfer agreements that have been described as a “significant step towards strengthening India’s aerospace manufacturing capabilities and supporting global supply chains.”
Under this agreement, a state-of-the-art manufacturing hub in Hyderabad dedicated to producing key Rafale structural components, including the lateral shells of the rear fuselage, central fuselage, and front sections, will be established.
The facility is expected to start rolling out fuselage segments by 2028, targeting a production rate of two complete fuselages per month. Final assembly will remain at Dassault’s plant near Bordeaux, France.
This deal is said to be helping Dassault, which faces a considerable backlog of approximately 220 Rafale orders worldwide, including 164 export orders from countries like Indonesia, Serbia, and the UAE, alongside a recent Indian Navy order for 26 carrier-based Rafale-M jets.
In a sense, the disinformation campaign against Rafale by China and its “proxy” Pakistan could very well be considered a strategy to discredit it in its potential market in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
China is doing its best to sell its military equipment in these regions, but it finds European competition to be very stiff and is unlikely to crack major deals there. China is now projecting that its J-10 fighters prevailed over Rafales during the India-Pakistan skirmishes to woo the Middle East and Indo-Pacific countries.
Indonesia is keen on a $8 billion deal to acquire 42 Rafales from Dassault, the first of which is scheduled for delivery next year. Beyond the air domain, Indonesia recently acquired a pair of Thaon di Revel-class frigates from Italy’s Fincantieri for $1.25 billion, and is building two Arrowhead 140 frigates under license from the U.K.’s Babcock at state-owned shipbuilder PT PAL. A project to co-develop two battery-powered Scorpene submarines with France’s Naval Group is also under negotiations.
In Malaysia, the French Naval Group is helping to deliver six long-delayed Littoral Combat Ships to the Royal Malaysian Navy. The Philippines has announced it would be procuring 40 fast patrol boats from France to shore up its Coast Guard, and has plans to buy at least two submarines. No final decision has been announced yet, but Naval Group and the Scorpene are reportedly in the running.
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It is against this background that one may understand China’s (dis)information war against Western arms through the narrative of the so-called supremacy of J-10 over Rafale.
Now, Chinese propagandists say that the theory that Chinese products like the J-10 fighter jet have been unproven in any combat no longer holds true.
Pakistan became the first country to display and use Chinese weapons and platforms in its war against India last month. Making the recycled and AI-generated footage, purportedly showing Pakistani military victories, shared widely on social media and then amplified by both its mainstream media, is nothing but weaponizing disinformation during wars, an evolving yet sophisticated strategy by China.
This Chinese strategy needs to be recognized and checkmated by all those who are its victims. In that sense, Jaishankar’s planned visit to Paris could well prove to be in the right direction.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
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