by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

In 1999, the Indian Army fought a three-month-long undeclared war with Pakistan. It was also the combat debut of India’s new Insas battle rifle.

The Insas is a very bad rifle.

During the conflict—waged over the disputed and mountainous Kargil district in the province of Kashmir—the Indian troops’ rifles jammed up, and their cheap, 20-round plastic magazines cracked in the cold weather.

To make a terrible weapon worse, the Insas had a habit of spraying oil directly onto the handler’s face and eyes.

Designed to shoot in semi-automatic and three-round burst modes, some soldiers would pull the trigger, and the gun would unexpectedly spray rounds like a fully automatic.

Soldiers also preferred the heavier 7.62-millimeter rounds in the FAL rifle, which the Insas and its 5.56-millimeter rounds replaced.

Then in 2005, Maoist rebels attacked a Nepalese army base. The Nepalese troops had Insas rifles bought from India. During the 10-hour-long battle, the rifles overheated and stopped working. The Maoists overran the base and killed 43 soldiers.

“Maybe the weapons we were using were not designed for a long fight,” Nepalese army Brig. Gen. Deepak Gurung said after the battle. “They malfunctioned.”

In November, India’s Central Reserve Police—which uses the rifle—finally had enough. The CRPF is a counter-insurgency force tasked with fighting Maoist rebels known as Naxalites in several eastern states.

“We have sent a proposal to the government that all Insas rifles with the force be replaced by AK rifles,” CRPF general director Dilip Trivedi told the Times of India. “The Insas has a problem of jamming. Compared to AK and X-95 guns, Insas fails far more frequently.”

Another CRPF soldier alleged New Delhi chose to “lose the lives of our jawans to promote a faulty indigenous gun,” he said, using the Indian term for a soldier.

The Insas make up almost half of the CRPF’s arsenal. That’s become an acute problem as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party push the counter-insurgents to crack down hard on the Naxalites.

As part of this offensive, the CRPF is relying more on heavier weapons such as mortars and grenade launchers. At the same time, the Maoists are building bigger bombs to use against the CRPF’s armored, “mine-protected” vehicles.

But there’s larger reasons why the Insas is such an awful gun.

The main cause was a myopic obsession among the Indian military beginning in the 1980s about relying more on weapons made at home. The state-owned Ordnance Factories Board manufactures the Insas.