A single bribe nearly ruined a defense partnership most people didn’t know even existed. It took India and Italy almost a decade to recover.
The story of how that rupture happened — and what it exposed about Italy’s quiet but deep role in India’s military — is essential to understanding why both countries now treat their renewed ties as something too valuable to lose again.
When Indian authorities cancelled the AgustaWestland helicopter contract in 2014, the fallout went far beyond the headlines. Torpedo supplies to the Indian Navy’s Scorpène-class submarines froze, upgrades to over 20 Sea King helicopters stalled, and a naval gun contract went unsigned. For nearly a decade, a corruption scandal held Indian-Italian defense relations hostage.
Today, the two countries are rebuilding their partnership with greater ambition. The latest achievement came during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Rome in May 2026, where India and Italy signed a Defence Industrial Roadmap, defining their relationship as a “Special Strategic Partnership”.
A relationship once defined by diplomatic estrangement and suspended contracts is now recast as a pillar of the two countries’ defense-industrial strategies. Yet the significance of this shift is difficult to appreciate without understanding what the rupture reveals in the first place. Often overlooked is Italy’s role in Indian defense procurement, but the record shows that Italian technology is deeply embedded in the Indian Navy. The disruption that followed the AgustaWestland scandal exposed both the extent of Italy’s integration into Indian naval capabilities and the costs that arise when a procurement controversy disrupts a broader strategic partnership.
As New Delhi and Rome pursue a new phase of defense cooperation centered on co-production, technology transfer, and industrial integration, the central challenge is no longer restoring the partnership but making it resilient. The institutional assets that would have prevented the last rupture still do not fully exist. Building mechanisms capable of insulating strategic cooperation from future procurement disputes is, therefore, not simply a lesson from the last decade. Concrete actions, such as a standing dispute resolution channel, defined technology transfer benchmarks written into a co-production contract, and a dedicated fast-track acquisition lane, are all prerequisites for the ambitions that both governments now share.
What Italy Put in India’s Hands
While Italy is rarely counted among India’s major defense suppliers — a group consisting of Russia, France, and the United States — Italian technology is woven through the Indian military, especially its navy. Understanding the Indian-Italian defense partnership begins with recognizing how much of India’s capability already rests on Italian technology, from subsystems and advanced materials to complete platforms, including naval guns, helicopters, and torpedoes.
Odero Terni Orlando (subsidiary of the Italian company Finmeccanica) Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited has licensed-manufactured the (OTO) Melara 76-millimeter gun in India since 1994. Designed in Italy and used by 60 navies worldwide, today it sits on dozens of Indian warships and Coast Guard vessels. In November 2023, Bharat received a new $310 million contract to manufacture 16 upgraded versions of the gun for new ships built at both Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers and Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders.
The helicopter story runs deeper. First Agusta, the Italian company that would eventually become AgustaWestland, and then Leonardo, began selling helicopters to India in the 1970s. The Agusta-Bell AB.212ASW, the anti-submarine warfare variant of the American Bell 212, built under license in Italy by Agusta — operated from shipboard platforms for anti-submarine warfare and search-and-rescue missions
Italy also supplied India with the Breda 40-millimeter anti-aircraft gun system, fielded on smaller naval vessels. The Black Shark heavyweight torpedo designed for India’s Scorpène-class submarines was another Italian contribution, supplied through Leonardo’s Whitehead Alenia Sistemi Subacquei subsidiary. The 127-millimeter naval gun, Italy’s larger deck gun used on frigates and destroyers, was also in the pipeline for Indian warships before the AgustaWestland scandal froze defense ties.
A pattern becomes evident, as Italy’s role in India’s naval architecture does not appear as peripheral, but structural. From guns to helicopters, to torpedoes and fire control systems, Italian technology has embedded itself in the Indian Navy, often through license manufacturing that placed Indian workers and Indian factories at the center of production. That a structure this extensive could be brought to a halt by a single procurement scandal is precisely what makes the AgustaWestland affair worth revisiting.
The AgustaWestland Rupture
The resilience of the Indian-Italian defense relationship allowed it to survive a decade-long freeze due to scandal, but the associated costs — namely, reduced operational readiness and lost market opportunities — should not be overlooked.
In 2010, India signed a $432 million contract with Leonardo’s subsidiary AgustaWestland for 12 VIP helicopters to carry the Indian president, prime minister, and other dignitaries. In February 2013, Italian authorities arrested Finmeccanica’s (now rebranded as Leonardo) own CEO, Giuseppe Orsi, on allegations of paying $60 million in bribes to win the contract. India’s defense minister ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation probe the very next morning.
What followed was a swift and total freezing of bilateral defense ties. India cancelled the helicopter contract, launched investigations, and suspended Leonardo from defense-related business in India. The ban further blocked the supply of 127-millimeter naval guns, Black Shark torpedoes for Scorpène submarines, and a midlife upgrade of over 20 Sea King naval helicopters.
Around the same time, the bilateral relationship suffered another setback. In February 2012, the Enrica Lexie case triggered a prolonged diplomatic and legal standoff that would consume both governments for nearly a decade, exacerbating the bilateral channel through which any commercial rehabilitation would have had to travel. Taken together, the Enrica Lexie case and the AgustaWestland scandal left Indian-Italian defense ties burdened by two unresolved crises simultaneously. In 2016, when Finmeccanica rebranded itself as Leonardo, India did not remove the ban on the entity.
For seven years, Leonardo remained outside India’s defense market. The ban shut the Italian firm out of a wide range of defense competitions in which its products would otherwise have been strong contenders.
Political re-engagement and the quiet rehabilitation of relations came in November 2021. The Indian government prohibited Leonardo from making any financial claims based on earlier agreements, which meant that it would have to start over. Leonardo accepted the conditions and agreed to withdraw financial claims linked to the cancelled helicopter order. India’s criminal and financial-crimes investigative agencies continued their investigations, but the decision nevertheless marked a calibrated political reopening of defense-industrial ties between the two countries.
What followed was a combination of strategic patience and a gradual rebuilding of trust. Leonardo made its way back quietly — first through civil aviation, then through supplying Whitehead Alenia Sistemi Subacquei torpedo to the Indian Navy, then through the Adani partnership to build an entire helicopter ecosystem on Indian soil. On the diplomatic track, Italy and India upgraded their relations on the sidelines of the meeting between Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2023, which marked 75 years of diplomatic ties.
The Conditions for Reconciliation
Restoring defense ties reflects a broader recalibration of bilateral priorities, marking a departure from the logic that sustained the freeze for nearly a decade. With criminal investigations still live and the scandal politically active, any dealing with Leonardo carried legal exposure and reputational risk that no Indian government wished to absorb, hence exclusion remained the path of least resistance.
The lifting of the Leonardo ban in 2021 did not happen because the legal cloud had fully cleared, nor because Italian lobbying had finally worn New Delhi down. Rather, the strategic environment that made the rupture tolerable changed — on both sides — in ways that made continued estrangement more costly than reconciliation.
On the Italian side, Italy’s abandonment of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative flagship project created a need for credible alternative partners in Asia. India was an attractive candidate in many ways. It is a democracy, a growing defense market, and a country whose naval modernization program offered specific openings for Leonardo and Fincantieri. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sharpened the logic further and extended it to the Indian side of the equation. For Italy, the war triggered a surge in European defense spending and a scramble for industrial capacity, at a time when Leonardo and Fincantieri were seeking new markets and dependable partners to supplement an increasingly overstretched European industrial supply base. A large, fast-growing, and politically aligned market like India satisfied both needs.
For India, the Russo-Ukrainian War exposed the structural fragility of a defense architecture built overwhelmingly around Russian platforms, at the precise moment Russian supply chains were fracturing under sanctions, and Moscow’s strategic reliability was becoming a serious question. While India’s response was not to abandon Russia altogether, it accelerated diversification with new urgency. The Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) program — Modi’s flagship effort launched in 2020 to localize defense production and cut import dependence, among other things — now operated in a far more acute strategic environment. Partners wanting to offer genuine technology transfer rather than finished products were suddenly scarcer and more valuable, as the war stretched the capacity of established suppliers and made overreliance on any single source a liability. Italy, with its strengths in naval artillery, undersea warfare, and rotary-wing platforms, was well positioned to fill that role, if the two governments can establish the requisite political conditions.
Since 2023, a new strategic partnership framework and personal affective ties between Meloni and Modi have added a new dimension to bilateral relations. What was once a cautious, conditional rehabilitation now acquired institutional substance: annual summits, structured foreign and defense ministerial dialogues, regular joint exercises and training between the two militaries, and a co-production agenda.
Where India and Italy Stand Today and What’s Really at Stake
The relationship has moved from procurement toward industrial integration, anchored in co-production and technology transfer. What is at stake is whether that shift produces real Indian capability or merely relocates assembly lines.
In November 2024, Modi and Meloni unveiled a four-year Joint Strategic Action Plan, outlining initiatives to negotiate a defense industrial roadmap, explore co-production and co-development opportunities, and enhance cooperation in counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and maritime infrastructure.
By the Indian armed forces’ own projections — cited by Adani Defence at the announcement of its partnership with Leonardo — India will require more than 1,000 helicopters over the coming decade. Leonardo, through Adani, is now positioned to supply a significant share of that demand — built in India, by Indian workers, with Italian technology. Leonardo has already established a presence in India through its supplies of heavyweight torpedoes to the Indian Navy and is now expanding cooperation with the Coast Guard. Italy is also in discussions to supply trainer aircraft and advanced naval guns and, crucially, to establish local production lines with full technology transfer.
Delivery, however, is the critical question for India. In most past deals, foreign partners transferred assembly work while retaining the source code, design rights, and critical subsystems that design the real industrial capacity. A genuine transfer would require access to design documentation, software source code, and the manufacturing know-how behind key subsystems. Whether Italy will go further than its predecessors is the question. The 2026 Defence Industrial Roadmap commits both sides to co-design and co-development rather than licensed assembly alone, which signals a willingness to share more — though the real test will be what is written into the contracts, not the communiqués, will ultimately determine the success of the agreement.
The co-production frameworks now taking shape between Italy and India give that shift institutional form. India has signed analogous agreements with over a dozen partners, including other European Union countries. What distinguishes the Italian relationship is the way personal rapport at the top, and institutional substance beneath, reinforce one another. The chemistry between Modi and Meloni supplied the political will to move quickly. The industrial fit between the two defense sectors gave it something durable to build on. The India-EU Defence and Strategic Partnership, signed in January 2026, lends a further institutional impetus to the bilateral relationship.
Talks at the end of April 2026 explicitly framed the industrial partnership within the Aatmanirbhar Bharat vision, with both sides exploring co-production of military hardware and co-development of critical technologies for India’s coastal defense force. Maritime security emerged as a parallel axis of convergence, with both New Delhi and Rome highlighting enhanced information exchange through the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region in Gurugram. During Modi’s May 2026 Rome visit, the two elevated relations to a special partnership — the highest they have reached — and agreed to jointly design, develop, and produce defense equipment. That agreement explicitly targets helicopters, naval platforms, marine armament, and electronic warfare. The visit gave a political capstone to what was already building at the industrial level. This co-production architecture, with its considerably broader ambitions, has implications for how both countries approach defense self-reliance and power projection.
Why Neither Side Can Afford To Underestimate This Moment
India and Italy’s partnership is now too consequential to leave exposed to the next controversy. Each side brings something the other cannot easily source elsewhere, and the cost of squandering that again would be far higher than in 2013.
Italy’s value to India is specific. As a middle power, Italy cannot offer the procurement volume available through the United States, nor the low prices and easy financing that have long made Russian hardware attractive to India. What it offers is precision in naval systems, underwater warfare, aerospace engineering, and electronics — exactly where India’s modernization gaps are deepest and where technology transfer, not mere purchase, is the only enduring answer.
India’s value to Italy is equally structural. India is not only a customer, but a platform that can absorb Italian technology, manufacture at scale, and feed Indian-made systems back into global supply chains. The Italian defense industry, led by Leonardo and Fincantieri, is built on strengths in defense electronics, aircraft, helicopters, naval artillery, and warships. India needs all of it.
The costs of the 2013 to 2021 rupture should not require elaboration, but they bear restating. At precisely the moment the Indian Navy’s operational demands were rising, given Chinese naval activity in the Indian Ocean expanded, the fleet pressed ahead with an ambitious expansion and modernization program. Yet, suppliers denied Italy access to guns, torpedoes, and critical platform upgrades. For the better part of a decade, Leonardo remained excluded from one of the world’s fastest-growing defense procurement markets. All of this followed from a single corrupt transaction. The risks of a second rupture — whether through institutional complacency, bureaucratic attrition, or external pressure to redirect Italian defense technology toward India’s strategic competitors — would carry a considerably higher price, affecting not only defense procurement but the manufacturing and industrial cooperation already in discussion.
The broader strategic environment only reinforces the urgency of closer coordination. Growing instability across the Middle East has increasingly linked the security dynamics of the Mediterranean and the Indo-Pacific, rather than separating them. The same shipping lanes and energy flows run through both, so that a disruption at a chokepoint such as the Suez Canal, the Bab-el-Mandeb, or the Strait of Hormuz is felt at once in European and Indian ports. For India and Italy in particular — both peninsular trading economies whose energy imports and external commerce move overwhelmingly by sea, and often through the very same corridors — a disruption in one theater now carries direct strategic consequences for the other. It is precisely in this context that Modi and Meloni have increasingly articulated an “Indo-Mediterranean” strategic vision, a framework recognizing the growing linkages between the two regions and the need for stronger political, economic, and defense coordination across them.
The two states have already absorbed the cost of wasted years. The industrial foundations are now firmly established, while the institutional frameworks have been restored through considerable effort. What remains is the harder work of consolidation. India should accelerate Italian participation in naval modernization and helicopter production — where the Adani-Leonardo joint facility already provides an industrial anchor — while publishing binding technology transfer criteria. It should also create a fast-track acquisition lane for strategic partners investing locally under Aatmanirbhar Bharat, with mandated decision timelines giving firms the planning horizon to commit. It should also move urgently to operationalize the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region maritime security framework agreed to during Modi’s Rome visit. Italy, for its part, should commit to transferring critical technologies in naval artillery and underwater systems, and formally designate India as a “tier one” industrial partner under its national defense export framework. Finally, both governments should establish a standing dispute resolution channel designed to protect strategic cooperation from individual procurement controversies. Durability, in other words, is an institutional achievement that should be engineered deliberately and defended actively. A second rupture, in a more interconnected and more contested strategic environment, would cost far more than the first.
Chiara Boldrini holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on international security and Indian foreign policy, and she has previously been a visiting researcher at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research in New Delhi. Her work has appeared in War on the Rocks, The Conversation, and 9DASHline.
Gaurav Kumar is a New Delhi-based journalist and researcher associated with the United Service Institution of India, the country’s oldest defense and strategic affairs think tank. His work focuses on Indian foreign policy, defense, and security in the Indo-Pacific. A regular opinion columnist for the South China Morning Post, his writing has also appeared in The Indian Express, Firstpost, Fair Observer, and Small Wars Journal.
Image: Office of the Prime Minister of India via Wikimedia Commons
