As a war fighting plane, a single squadron of F-35 C (catapult launching plane) will be in my opinion more effective for the Indian Navy than more squadrons of MiG-29K or F-18 super hornet, or rafale.
The reason is that the plane is developed by companies who have a lot of experience in designing planes which operate from aircraft carriers (very harsh ocean environment), and the primary role of our naval planes will be of fleet defence and limited strike, we will not be in a financial and geo political position to engage in hostilities far away from our nation in the foreseeable future.
The F-35 provides us with a plane that has high end electronics with radar signature management as a design priority, it will be ideal for fleet defence from incoming threats, it will also be a very good reconnaissance platform as it is able to degrade the performance of any early warning ship or land based radar (by its stealth along) and is quite a good electronic intelligence collecting assset (another design priority), and it can attack those radars along with many other limited targets from sea without giving away its position. Its size and engine fit in nicely into the small-medium carriers we are planning.
The F-35B version has the added burden of maintainability of the vertical lift mechanism which will require more man hours, however it will be able to perform from a lot of the currently planned ships, INS Vik. and IAC-1. It will also be a evolution of the current naval aviation tradition, which i think will make the navy understand the plane much better.
The problem is the time-line, INS Vik and IAC-1 will come out at times when the planes will not be around for purchase and a aircraft carrier without the aircrafts is just a large ship with lots of helicopters, a waste of money, so the Mig-29s have to be purchased, and once they are we can not retire them pre maturly as every rupee we spend on them is through a lot of careful consideration.
If possible i am still in favour of purchasing the F-35Cs for IAC-2 along with the required modifications done on the ship.
The F-35 does not need a lot of its thrust in the all internal weapons carrying stealth mode as there are limited external stores, hence i think it will have the thrust to take off from a ski jump and land with the arrested recovery mechanism, so even when the IAC-2 is in the docks getting repaired the F-35s will be able to perform from the IAC-1 or INS-Vik.
A single squadron will give the Navy the capacity to tremendously increase its capacity, the sheer investment required by our foes to counter them will be worth it.
I do not think the MiG-29K is not a good plane, i think if it performs well i the ocean atmosphere and is has a good availability rate, it will be very potent over the ocean performing as a fleet air defence plane, it has a good thrust to weight ratio, guided by early warning radars it can move very fast to shoot at any threat that the fleet might face, it has a wide variety of long ranged (up to 300 kms) anti shipping missiles to fire at any opposition fleet well outside their anti air measures.
However on strike missions it has the disadvantage of being a plane with radar signature management measures as an addition to the design as opposed to a design requirement, so it will be detected by enemy air and land based early warning radars and will have to fight its way to the target, which is a trouble as the small-medium aircraft carriers we have will have limited number of planes. Still with their induction we have ensured that nations like Pakistan have to burn more money and increase their air defence capability over the sea.