Antony

New Delhi, Sept. 6: A.K. Antony leaves for the US tonight on his first visit as defence minister in the thick of an engagement with the Pentagon that has proposed to send him back with an arms inspection programme titled Golden Sentry.

The defence minister has already said he would not be signing any of the agreements with the US that have been pending for close to two years. But the Pentagon is “frontloading” India’s military establishment with its policies in expectation of huge arms orders from New Delhi.

The Golden Sentry is bound to be among the most controversial of these policies because it involves physical verification by US “Tiger Teams” of American military hardware that India has bought or proposes to buy.

Unlike his predecessor Pranab Mukherjee, Antony has been reluctant to be directly linked to India-US military pacts but the Pentagon is keeping up a constant series of briefings in his ministry to “educate” India on US arms transfer regulations.

Ministry officials engaged in talks with their Pentagon counterparts have been trying to work around the stiff rules under an End-Use Verification Agreement by trying to eliminate physical inspections from the monitoring process.

But the Enhanced End-Use Monitoring Programme and its Golden Sentry — without which India’s armed forces cannot access sophisticated American military equipment — does not allow for such slack in the inspection rules.

Three of the most crucial pacts that are pending approval of the cabinet committee on security are the Logistics Support Agreement, the End-Use Verification Agreement and the Communications and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement.

But it is the arms inspection programme under the Enhanced End-Use Verification Agreement called Golden Sentry that bureaucrats in the defence and foreign ministries are studying closely, aware of the political dynamite it can detonate.

India has already accepted the arms inspection programme in a limited way for six Boeing business jet aircraft that it has bought to fly the Prime Minister, the President and other VVIPs. The first jet landed in Delhi last month.

But the defence ministry managed to wriggle out of the Sentry clause in the monitoring pact for the aircraft by procuring avionics and the aircraft’s self-defence suite through a purchase from private companies instead of a government-to-government transfer.