Not true. I don't think you're aware of the details.
The Jaguar was a DPSA for the IAF, a strike jet. It was acquired in the late 1970s and HAL had already started manufacturing them when the IAF bought Mirage-2000s in the mid 1980s to counter the PAF acquisition of the F-16A. The Mirage-2000 was the ONLY other FBW equipped fighter in the world apart from the F-16 (and given that the F-18 wasn't an option) and considered the most modern available to the IAF.
The original plan was to buy 40 Mirages off the shelf and then opt for license manufacture of 100 Mirage-2000s in India at HAL. That was a part of the options clause for the original contract of the Mirage-2000s itself.
But then USSR came and offered the RAM-K (later called the MiG-29) soon after the Mirage-2000s were bought. The MiG-29 had been a super secret program of theirs and had only been offered to Warsaw Pact countries. IAF officers evaluated it, loved it's incredible T/W ratio and performance and suggested to the GoI and MoD to acquire them.
Soon after, there were 2 types of air superiority fighters in the IAF, the Mirage-2000 and the MiG-29. Thanks to the MiG-29 coming into the mix, the options clause for the Mirage-2000 was never converted since there was confusion as to whether to manufacture the costlier Mirage-2000 in India or the cheaper MiG-29. Later on, in the 1990s, India's economy all but collapsed and all talk of the license manufacture dissipated. The serviceability headaches of the MiG-29 meant that the IAF didn't want any more of them beyond the 75 odd that it bought from the USSR.
Later on, the Russians offered the Su-27UB and it was evaluated by the IAF and eventually that led to the Su-30MKI program in the late 1990s to early 2000s.
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