IVOS 2: ΚΕΙΜΕΝΑ,ΕΙΚΟΝΕΣ

  France's Dassault beat EADS on Tuesday in a bid to negotiate the sale of its Rafale fighter jet (pictured here) to India. EADS Loses Massive Contract India Opts For French Fighter Jets By Hasnain Kazim French defense manufacturer Dassault has beaten EADS for the right to negotiate exclusively with the Indian government on the sale of 126 fighter jets. Still, the deal could ultimately collapse -- in the past, all other talks to sell Dassault's Rafale aircraft abroad have failed. Experts already thought it was a done deal that India would purchase Europe's prestigious Eurofighter fighter jets -- if for no other reason than the fact that the purchase would have made India the fifth country in the EADS consortium, as the government in New Delhi had been promised. In a recent letter to her Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh, German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote that India would become a "fifth partner country" next to Germany, Britain,