For political reasons, India decided to adopt the 7.62mm NATO cartridge when it needed to replace its No1 MkIII SMLE bolt action rifles with a modern self-loader. They chose the FN FAL as the rifle to adopt, but wanted a license to produce it domestically at the Ishapore rifle factory. FN insisted on the Indians buying Belgian tools as part of the agreement, which India was unwilling to do. So instead, Ishapore used the samples it had of both British L1A1 and Belgian FAL rifles to produce its own reverse-engineered drawings.
The resulting plans use a mixture of British (“inch”) and Belgian (“metric”) parts, and are not interchangeable with either standard pattern. As a result, the Indian 1A1 rifle is a clone of the FAL that is not actually parts compatible with the FAL. That did not prevent Ishapore from producing hundreds of thousands of them, with production apparently ending only in 2012.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this 1A1 example to film for you!
Very interesting. I had assumed the Indian FAL was a standard inch pattern just from looking at it. I did not know that India stiffed both Enfield and FN. I wonder if they ever paid royalties?
I also notice that the Indians did not waste much time on polishing the rifles. I have seen better finished Sten guns. But so long as they work…
I wonder if FN ever sued. (And yes these are very much “the FAL we have at home.”)
My first remark on seeing the finish was similar if less polite…
I’d love for Ian to get into the Indian arsenal system and do a full-on retrospective on all their weapons, but… I suspect that he’d wind up run-over by someone driving a cab before any of it made the light of day.
I’ve got a Sikh friend who is a bit of a firearms nut. His description of what goes on in India vis-a-vis firearms and procurement for the Indian military is breathtakingly obscene, and I’ve only ever heard him swear when he describes the things he had to put up with as a soldier and police officer. The ongoing theme of it all is “Corruption” with a strong component of “Incompetence”. I think he was still “doing things” for the police when they brought in the early INSAS weapons for testing, and it was his take that the armed police who were going after the Maoist guerrillas would be better armed if they just gave them the usual Indian go-to police weapon of a long stick; the lathi. The rifles were an abomination, in his description.
He’s a fairly patriotic Indian, but… Weapons? He’s of the opinion that only a traitor to India would insist on Indian-made weapons for their Army and police.
Lots and lots of corruption, tons of feather-bedding, and the fact that they got away with stiffing both Royal Ordnance and FN is something that only encouraged them to screw over everyone else, from the aviation side of things to artillery. Doing business in India as a weapons manufacturer is only slightly less risky than doing business in China.
“(…)early INSAS weapons(…)rifles were an abomination, in his description.(…)”
If you wish to see abomination improved, then see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QFTPsJHsAQ namely Colonel Bansod’s first reinvention- the INSAS BULLPUP which would combine unpredictable reliability of base weapon with most probably poor ergonomics often ensuing when someone attempts to bull-pup AKM or descendant thereof.
When I was in India year before last, I saw quite a few of these being carried. They haven’t thrown them away.
Nor have they their Lees, or the funny single shot security guard shotguns.
India is such a bizarre mess as far as small arms procurement. Why they would use both Commbloc and NATO pattern weapons is a mystery to me. If they ever get in a serious war logistics is going to be a real problem.
I think a huge part of the problem with Indian small arms and general military procurement is that the people doing it are completely uninterested in logistics. My Sikh friend was telling me some stories about all the crap he’d had to put up with as a part of police district administration, and the kind of crap they had to put up with… They’d wanted to get long arms for their stations; that took nearly six months just working out what paperwork to file with what set of people, and by the time they’d completed the initial process, it had changed in the name of “rationalization”, and they had to start all over again with different people. Meanwhile, the first set of bureaucrats came back with “Yeah, you’ll need to do this over again, you filled it all out wrong…”, when they weren’t even supposed to be involved any more. The whole thing was epically Byzantine, and no, the police never got their rifles.
Read a lot of Cold War era Indian military procurement as a geopolitical exercise where balancing relations with the vendor state is the goal, rather than acquiring a rational suite of weapons systems for use in a peer war (nb. Pakistan is not a peer opponent so long as things don’t get nuclear).
A guy I knew used to say that everything involving the Indian government a lot more sense if you assume that it was in fact carefully designed by a Pakistani sleeper agent
That, or the Chinese sleeper agents.
Indian military procurement has been an endless cornucopia of “own goals” since the Brits left, and you have to marvel at the decay since. I’ve seen some of the pre-WWII production Vickers-Berthier LMGs, and they were quite nice. Same arsenals later production of things like the FAL-alike Ian outlines here? Well, you see what they did with it all.
The really bizarre thing is, you go back and look at the stuff India was churning out before the Raj? It was better than a lot of European arsenals were turning out. Since the industrial revolution, however? It’s all been downhill.
Try Indian Indians, not Chinese. India is the world’s oldest diversity experiment ongoing. The States are drifting the same way. Welcome to Kali Yuga, sahib.
read Bunker 13 for an exciting and funny fictional account of spy vs spy indopak edition