Guys no point talking about this - This has no bearing on Indian Defense as such.
18 more F-16s cannot match 100 odd SU 30 MKIs close to 150 in the next some years and then 126+ MMRCAs all top notch best in the world.
It is a good exercise to get a feel of the OBAMA administration towards India - Its plain Diplomacy - even if they are buying them or getting them in AID we should not be concerned as much - It does augment their capabilities but then in the current scenario with a huge fleet of ours the, 60-80 F-16s cannot do a lot of harm to us so really we do not need to react at all.
Our government warned the US, now if US goes ahead with it, they will only have themselves to blame if they do not win the 126-200 odd aircrafts deal and quite frankly we will not be losing out on anything since we have better aircrafts than the F-18s and the F-16s in the competition.
I would anyways put the F-18s out since we just got a fleet of Mig 29Ks for our carrier and more on Order, so an F-18 looks like out of the Question - On the other hand now that the F-16 are being considered as "Target Practice Drones" by the US apart from the fact that Pakistan has already mastered that bird, it will definitely not go down well with our AF and the public if we buy them.
So from where I look at this both th F-16s and F-18s are out of the contenders already. But the Indian government is smart - it may have found a way to blame the US for them losing despite the fact that we were never gonna buy them anyways! LOL!
THE BABUs are not all that stupid!