AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 7 – Panorama CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 233 of 332 4 1971 – The Year That Changed The Indian Navy Cmde G Prakash NM Genre: Reminiscence ifty years ago, the Indian Navy played a critical part in breaking Pakistan into two. Such was the impact of the event, that along with Pakistan, the two nation theory too lay broken. Hard Lessons Lessons of that war of 1971, which begat Bangladesh, had much material for policy makers in India. If they studied the lessons carefully, they could understand what a good Navy could do for a country like India. With centuries of terra centricity at the core of the nation’s political and strategic consciousness, getting India to believe in a Navy, was tough. This, despite India having experienced the tragedy of debilitating European colonialism for centuries. The Europeans had come solely by the vast sea around us, which, for various reasons, we had neglected for long. The Europeans steadily encroached into our lives, disrupted capabilities developed over thousands of years of continuous existence, imposed alien systems and structures and finally subjugated us almost completely. They sucked us dry of our wealth, and cast us into an industrialised world in an inadequate state, as the last of them left. This experience should have drilled into our collective consciousness, the unpleasant lesson that it was only when we had forgotten our seas, that we had lost our freedom. But that was not to be. When Opportunity Beckoned After having been left out of the previous wars since independence, including the 1965 episode when the Pakistani Navy attempted some feeble offensive operations off the Gujarat coast, the war of 1971 was a godsend. The Indian Navy welcomed the opportunity wholeheartedly and proved their worth in spectacular fashion. If India needed a lesson to understand sea power, there was none better. Quiet on the Western Front When small, yet fast and lethal Missile Boats, supported ably by larger surface ships burned Karachi harbour and sank Pakistani ships hanging around off their coast, they wrote an unforgettable thesis for the nation to trust modern surface warfare, employing Surface to Surface Missiles, which were just coming of age then. That this act forced the Pakistani Navy to withdraw into their own harbour on Day Two of the war, never to come out for the rest of the war, is something the Pakistan F