AS a brother of someone who lost his life in the tragedy, I keenly read PNS Ghazi’s mention in Rafia Zakaria’s memoir The Upstairs Wife — An intimate History of Pakistan.
Some 45 years back, when its loss was fresh, Ghazi never got the credit it deserved.
The Indian intelligence was well aware that Vikrant was constantly under Pakistani surveillance. Thus Vikrant was steamed away to the Andamans far out of reach of Ghazi. Also, Ghazi’s presence in the Bay of Bengal came to light when a signal addressed to naval authorities in Chittagong was intercepted. They rightly concluded that Ghazi was stalking Vikrant.
Unable to locate Vikrant, Ghazi presumably turned back to Vishakapatnam — in order to lay mines to bottle up the Indian Navy’s heavy units.
On Dec 10, 2003, a team of divers from the Eastern Indian Naval Command was sent down to have another look at Ghazi’s wreckage. The findings of this underwater expedition removed several ambiguities. First, the nature of the mechanical damage to the hull which was bending outwards suggested that Ghazi almost certainly suffered an internal explosion. Thus it rules out the possibility that inadvertently Ghazi became a victim of its own mines.
Various websites differ in their accounts. One version closest to reality states that on or around Nov 28, when Ghazi was in shallow waters only about 100 feet deep at periscope depth, in order to avoid a direct collision with INS Magar (landing ship tanker), whose presence on the sea surface was detected very late due to a miscalculated periscope distance reading, Ghazi took an immediate dive turning left away from the collision course. With a huge momentum the nose of the sub dashed into the rocky sea-bed.
The impact breached the fore torpedo room which was flooded with water. One of the fired torpedoes was trapped shut in the torpedo tube. The crew from then onwards was sitting on an armed torpedo tube ready to fire. The crew made all-out efforts to make the sub rise till that fateful night between Dec 3 and 4 when the vibrations created by a depth charge fired from a passing ship exploded the trapped torpedo and triggered a chain of explosions from weaponry from within the sub.
Nasir Khan
Karachi
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2016
