1971 war: Commander Khan's revenge
The death of the Vikrant draws the curtain on the 1971 war’s most spectacular chase.
| 5-minute read | 01-12-2014
As I write this, contract labourers in a Mumbai scrapyard, are slicing away with blow torches at the Indian navy’s greatest warship, the Vikrant. The slow death of the Vikrant rings down the curtains in an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors that began this month, 43 years ago.
On November 14, 1971, the PNS Ghazi, a US-built submarine loaned to the Pakistan Navy, slipped out of Karachi harbour.
War with India was imminent. The Ghazi, helmed by commander Zafar Muhammad Khan, would be in place to fire the opening salvo. Where that salvo would be fired, was a secret known only to commander Khan and a handful of his comrades on shore. Khan was a well regarded submariner. He had been executive officer of Pakistan’s first new-build submarine, the PNS Hangor commissioned in France two years earlier by commander Ahmed Tasnim. Khan’s executive officer, Lt Cdr Pervaiz Hameed, had served as the Hangor’s navigating officer. There were 92 crew on board.
The Ghazi’s destination was not Mumbai, home to the Indian navy’s powerful Western fleet, which she sailed past on November 16. Her knife-life hull glided around peninsular India and Sri Lanka before she entered the Bay of Bengal. She traversed the 2200 nautical miles with ease. The Diablo had a 11,000 nautical mile (17,000 km) range, being specifically designed to transit the Pacific Ocean.
Locating the target for her torpedoes and mines, was the only issue. On November 23, the Ghazi entered a patrol area codenamed Zone Mike: Madras.
The Ghazi was on a blood hunt. Her quarry was the pride of the Indian navy: its sole aircraft carrier the INS Vikrant.
Just where on the east coast the Vikrant was, the Pakistan navy was not sure. But they knew why she was there: a crack in the carrier’s boiler had reduced the Vikrant’s speed to a limp, barely enough to allow her to launch her deadly warplanes— British-built Sea Hawk fighter jets and French Alize anti-submarine aircraft. The Vikrant was now deployed on India’s east coast where it was thought she would be safe from the Pakistani submarines.
The Ghazi prowled off Chennai for three days before a signal from commodore Submarines, Karachi on November 26 electrified commander Khan. “Occupy Zone Victor with all dispatch. Intelligence indicates carrier in port.”
It was the message Khan had been waiting for. Zone Victor was Visakhapatnam.
The Ghazi arrived here on November 27. Commander Khan hunched over the notched crosshairs of his periscope, scanned the coast for a week. There was no sign of the Vikrant’s distinctive 600-feet long silhouette. He then began laying his trap. A series of two-metre-long cylindrical containers — deadly "influence mines" on the muddy seabed at the mouth of Vizag harbour. Each mine was an aluminum container with a half-ton of high explosive. When the Vikrant or any other warship passed overhead, its magnetic field would trigger the mine off. The resulting column of water would leap out of the sea and shatter the warship.
On the night of December 3, the people of Visakhapatnam were awoken by a thunderous explosion. The blast came from out at sea but the shockwave rattled windows ashore. It could not be explained. At daybreak, fishing boats reported life jackets and other debris. Divers onboard a naval patrol craft sent out to investigate, reported a Pakistani submarine sitting on the seabed. The forward section of the submarine had been blown out. When the divers cut open the hatch, bloated bodies of six crewmen floated out. Divers who entered the conning tower recovered maps, charts and signals that precisely detailed the Ghazi’s final voyage. It was clear what had happened. The Ghazi had suffered a catastrophic internal explosion. One of its deadly mines had either been jammed in a tube and gone off, or she had accidentally triggered off one of the mines she had laid. The warrior had fallen on its own sword even before the war had begun.
The Vikrant, meanwhile, steamed out of her hiding place in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands over 1000 miles away. On the morning of December 6, three days after the Ghazi blew itself up, the Vikrant launched the first of several air strikes against coastal installations in East Pakistan. The carrier prevented the seaborne escape of the Pakistan armed forces garrison.
The Indian navy manufactured an elaborate story to back the claim that its warship, the INS Rajput, had sunk the Ghazi. The navy’s official history states that the elderly World War II era destroyer, laid up for decommissioning at Vizag, had rolled down depth-charges which had killed the submarine. In any event, the navy did not allow a detailed investigation into the Ghazi’s sinking and refused offers from the United States and the Soviet Union to raise the vessel.
Exactly a decade ago, I was lucky to have become one of the few civilians to have actually seen the Ghazi.
I was on a Gemini inflatable off the coast of Vizag peering into a colour monitor. Over 30 metres below me, a naval diver stood on the wreck of the submarine and pointed a camera, recording what he saw. Over three decades underwater had stripped away the submarine’s outer pressure hull, its barnacle encrusted surface virtually indistinguishable from the seabed. The expedition which could not have been possible without the assistance of the Indian navy helped me to scrape together evidence to solve one of the biggest naval mysteries of recent times. Pictures, sonar images and testimonies of the divers suggested the Ghazi sank after an internal explosion.
The expedition came five years after I ran a successful campaign at the Indian Express which briefly threw it a lifeline to the Vikrant. Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena-BJP government gave the historic warship a Rs 6.5 crore grant. But the grant extended the warship’s life only for a decade.
Successive state governments lacked the enthusiasm or the vision to pursue the project. And even the Indian navy, which tended the warship for nearly two decades after her 1996 retirement, washed their hands off.
CommentIn a few weeks, the Vikrant will be atomised. Her role in the 1971 war will be consigned to history books, her valuable steel will be melted into bars, the anonymous building blocks of multi-storeyed buildings and bridges of a new India. The tragic commander Khan remains on board the Ghazi, on "eternal patrol" off Vizag. He has finally had his revenge.
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