‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ and blood: The darker side of India’s defence boom

The Amnesty International on July 30 released a report with a simple, uncomfortable title: Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel. This is not a piece of advocacy rhetoric. It is a documentary trail built on 2,596 shipments, tracked through public trade data between India and Israel since October 7, 2023. Its conclusion deserves a far wider public airing than it has so far received: India, through both private manufacturers and state-owned companies, has become a significant contributor to the supply chains that sustain Israel’s military operations in Gaza — and in doing so, it risks complicity in crimes under international law.

The report lands at a moment of unusual legal gravity. Barely a month earlier, a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, led by Justice S Muralidhar, concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. Amnesty’s own investigation goes further on the Indian angle, arguing that continuing to authorise arms transfers after such clear warnings means Indian authorities “cannot credibly argue that they did not know” of the substantial risk that these weapons would be used in serious violations.

The numbers in the report are specific, and they matter. Amnesty says Indian companies supplied at least 390,516 small arms parts for military-grade weapons, 564,970 parts of explosive ordnance — including drone warheads and artillery shell casings — and 298 components of military vehicles to Israeli firms that directly supply the Israeli military. The named recipients include Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, IMI Systems and MCT Materials. Most striking of all, the report identifies companies that are directly owned and controlled by the Government of India among the exporters. Amnesty’s secretary-general, Agnes Callamard, put it bluntly: “India manufactures and supplies arms transferred to Israel through its ownership and control over key supplier companies.”

A boom built on opacity:

None of this should be read as an argument against India’s defence manufacturing ambitions. By every official metric, the sector is in the middle of a genuine boom. Production touched a record ₹1.78 lakh crore in FY 2025-26, up from ₹1.51 lakh crore the previous year, and exports crossed ₹38,424 crore — more than fifty times their level a decade ago. The private sector’s share of output has climbed to roughly 24 per cent, its highest ever, with private firms now supplying nearly half of India’s export basket. Firms that once made components now assemble, and in some cases design, rifles, artillery, drones and missiles. In this one sector, Aatmanirbhar Bharat has visibly delivered scale.

The problem is that scale and transparency have not grown at the same pace. India now has at least fifteen private firms making firearms, over five hundred drone start-ups, and roughly a hundred companies making missile components — yet the public knows remarkably little about who buys what, in what quantities, and for what end use.

This gap is official, not imagined. The Ministry of Defence’s press release marking last year’s export record mentioned more than 80 destination countries but published no country-wise or product-wise value table — for the second-year running.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the world’s most cited arms-trade tracker, does not even place India among the world’s top twenty-five exporters, a sharp contrast with New Delhi’s own figures. Part of the divergence is definitional: India counts dual-use items like aircraft components as defence exports, while SIPRI does not. But a definitional gap this wide, sustained across years, is something the government owes citizens an explanation for — not a footnote.

Rules on paper, questions in practice:

India is not without an export-control architecture. The SCOMET list, administered jointly by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade and the Department of Defence Production, requires export authorisation, a signed end-user certificate, and inter-ministerial screening before any munitions consignment leaves the country. On paper, this is a reasonably rigorous regime, broadly aligned with international frameworks like the Wassenaar Arrangement.

The real question is not whether rules exist, but how the end-use side of that paperwork is verified once a crate has left an Indian port. The deeper worry, raised by defence analysts rather than established facts in any single case, is re-export: mature arms industries have historically used third-country manufacturing and offset partnerships to reach buyers who prefer not to be seen purchasing directly. Given how deeply some Indian firms now co-manufacture with foreign defence majors, whether India’s expanding base could in principle serve such a role — and what safeguards exist against it — is squarely a foreign-policy question that deserves parliamentary debate, not defence-ministry file notings alone.

Legal stakes have changed:

It is here that the Amnesty report changes the terms of the discussion. Under the law of state responsibility, a state that transfers weapons while knowing they could be used to commit international crimes may itself risk complicity. The International Court of Justice has already issued provisional measures recognising a plausible risk of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. That finding — combined with Amnesty’s documented shipments continuing long after public warnings — is why the question is no longer merely one of better statistics.

Amnesty’s demand is unambiguous: India must immediately stop authorising exports of weapons, ammunition and parts to Israel, and must ensure that companies operating under its jurisdiction do not contribute to crimes under international law. The group also urges all states and private entities to cease business with Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.

What should follow:

A balanced reading of all this does not demand that India abandon its defence industry, or its long-standing, publicly acknowledged relationship with Israel. What it demands is that the country stop treating the arms trade as a black box. Three steps would help. First, the government should publish a country-wise and company-wise annual export disclosure, going beyond headline totals — Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence could usefully mandate this. Second, New Delhi should explain, in detail, why its export figures and SIPRI’s diverge so sharply. Third, and most urgently, it should state clearly how it reconciles its stated foreign-policy principles with continuing weapons transfers to a conflict in which credible international bodies — from the UN commission to the ICJ to Amnesty — have found a plausible risk of genocide. An arsenal this large, built substantially with private capital and public contracts, cannot remain a black box indefinitely — not for citizens who foot the defence budget, and not for a country that still wants its foreign policy to be judged by its stated principles rather than by what quietly leaves its factory gates. The world is now watching what India ships, and where it goes. India owes its citizens — and the international community — a clearer answer than silence.

(The writer is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cholleti

[email protected]