Fresh Tranche Of Leaked Documents In Indian Navy’s Scorpene Submarine Program

A fresh tranche of sensitive documents pertaining to Indian Navy’s Scorpene submarine project have been uploaded by ‘the Australian’ on its website Thursday even as the Indian ministry of defense tried to downplay the leak as ‘not serious’.

The new set of documents with Indian Navy insignia on it and marked “Restricted Scorpene India” include the sonar system, including the frequencies used by its key components, the Flank Array, the Sonar Intercept Receiver, the Distributed Array and the Active Array have been compromised. All these systems work together to allow the submarine to detect enemy warships and submarines and attack those using torpedoes.

The documents posted earlier have been examined and do not pose any security compromise as the vital parameters have been blacked out," the defence ministry said in a statement earlier. However, it is The Australian which has redacted sensitive data. It is possible that these documents are also available to others.

Though the Navy has not yet officially reacted to the release of new documents, sources maintained that it does not compromise national security. They said the same information about a submarine was on “many naval defence websites”. “On the face of it, these documents are basic operating
manual. You buy any goods from the market, it will come with an operating manual,” defence analyst Commodore Uday Bhaskar (Retd), Director of Society of Policy Studies told PTI.

If the question is if tonight’s revelation has made our submarines vulnerable, “then the answer is no”, he said. “It is more like basic operating instructions for the user,” he said.

The paper said it has been told that the secret data was removed from DCNS by a former sub-contractor in 2011 and taken to a private company in Southeast Asia before being passed on to a branch of that company in a second Southeast Asian nation.

A disk containing the data filed was then posted in regular mail to a company in Australia. DCNS is focusing its investigation on former employees
and sub-contractors involved in the project. At this stage it is not thought that the leak came from India.