That is because Indian is military does not trust the indigenous hardware. Maybe time will change but as of now, India need to rely on foreign assistance for quality weaponry such as Brahmos or modify its planes to carry this missile. But my main focus was not that India cannot build most of its weapons, but that if India develops a closer relationship with either US or Russia, then the relationship can mature beyond just a business relationship. As of now, India straddles between Russia and the US. And this is actually counter productive when purchasing weapons as all the transaction between India with US and Russia are all business relationships only. If anyone still believe that there is a special relationship between India and Russia (such as between US and Israel or your buddies China and Pakistan), hope this thread have waken you up from your dream.
Totally baseless statement.
In fact, exactly opposite has been true. During Cold-war times, Russia has always kept their most elite projects open for its cold-war ally India. Even China wasn't trusted that much and merely has remained as buyer. On other side, Russia has assisted India in setting up almost EVERY major R&D base in India, from ship-building, submarines, helicopters etc. and even today its Russia who is providing test-bed for most critical R&D project(Kaveri).
Also, not to mention Uranium and massive nuclear power reactor R&D assistance/consultancy. Which other country on earth helped India with that?
It is India who has failed to make use of all these opportunities and focus on R&D projects since beginning. Indians never gave priority to R&D and instead became LAZY and complacent because of "easy" and "availability" of weapons from Russia. Not to mention, corruption and visionless decision-making in IAF, Army and blind faith on Russian imports and ignoring developing own R&D capabilities, is exactly what has caused the mess India is in today.
Why blame Russia? It is the Indian decision-making which was way too complacent and living under the age of convenient Russian imports. India never focused on developing domestic R&D base as priority.
In fact, Russia has been Godfather of India all these decades(even if Russian-haters hate to admit this) and India has been all complacent all these decades. Hopefully, India will use PAK-FA sensibly and not repeat mistakes of being happy with foreign partners and not developing its own parallel fifth Generation aircraft programme domestically, based on inputs from PAK-FA.
And talking about Brahmos spat, then Russia is original developer of Su-30 so it has a right to ask payments for modifications to original design.
Now if Boeing or some european firm asked for such payment on some modification project, MoD wouldn't blink & will pay even double. But since Indo-US nuke deal, lot of Russia-haters has raised their ugly head in MoD.
My thousand thanks to Russia for giving a kick in India's balls. If you can't modify Su-30 yourself, then better go and become a puppet of USA. You deserve that.
Writing on the wall is very clear - "Russia has stopped babysitting. Grow up and stand on your own feets. If you need to go back to Russia for every modification, then you are nothing but a tin-bag power. Better move your as* and develop your own capabilities instead of asking for being babysit. Even pony nations like Israel can modify Su-30 for fitting a missile of their choice. What those think-tanks in Mod are? Tin-bag babies?"
Now its for MoD if they read this clear message.