While the who saga of production, timely delivery and establishing a robust supply chain along with high availability of spares are issues which come at a later note...GoI/MoD should focus on bagging the contract and for this to happen, they need to employ PR firms and lobbying groups to influence the decision in our favor while also providing financial guarantee to the contract which is exactly why we lost the Philippines Navy corvette contract to the South Koreans
They should do a whole lot of things, but nothing changes the fact that IAF is severely squadron-deficit and capacity issues are being entrenched regardless.
That effects ability/attractiveness to export.
Even if you do export, it then has impact on those airframes not going toward IAF which sorely needed the (already late) 83 or so long time ago.
A "hidden" supply-based cost, self imposed and gestated for decades.
It (along with deployed + proven time at number) is all noticed by world markets given these are high value added low number items that carry strategic relation weight too.
Then the extra costs+time of changing whatever the client asks (could be some Israeli hardware in this case)...that will all have to be priced in.
India today is simply not a fighter surplus or production surplus country to provide a large majority basis of what is looked at and negotiated by prospective buyers.
Add to that relations with Malaysia have taken their ups and downs with India. Will they change their vote in FATF while buying Indian hardware (that Indian military itself has huge scarcity of and is very slowly and correcting very late in the game).
So it all remains to be seen in making do with what the cake is baked like now.
If Tejas had multiple squadrons in operation by now (as it should have) and plenty of proven spare production capacity (i.e deficit in IAF reduced to some degree and proven commitment to further energy it can muster to addressing the squadron shortfall)...it would be different and far more assured proposition in winning this....but it is not the case.
Simply, 83 Tejas production rate impact (given sustained IAF deficit in squadrons for 10+ years already and 10+ years going forward) is the big issue to consider w.r.t any export contracts imposing on that already narrow supply chain.
18 LIFT-LCA export models is neither here nor there (number wise) in say likely getting India's peculiar MIC strategy to open up extra capacity (say outside of HAL to a corporate)....it will likely have impact on existing one.
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