India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  Another classmate, Parneet Hira, a public relations expert in Delhi, says, ‘I couldn’t believe he was no more. It’s hard to think of him as anything but a bundle of joy. He was never gloomy. I remember how he was on top of the world when he made it to the Army. It was all he ever wanted. His life was the Army, apart from his football obsession, dancing with his shirt off and those secret drinking sessions. Women loved him. Everyone loved him.’

  Col. Mishra would travel to Shillong with his wife a few days later to meet David’s family, a customary visit for every CO. Condoling the loss of a son and an officer together is a bond few outside the Army can fully appreciate.

  ‘With the heaviest of hearts, I shared with his parents that David had made it to the NSG, and I was to share the news with him just two days after his final operation,’ Col. Mishra says. ‘Had he not made this sacrifice, by that time, he would have been on his way to Manesar near Delhi to begin his training and probation with the NSG. He was moving out.’

  Khamzalam had smiled at the news.

  ‘David would have been very happy to hear he had made it to the NSG,’ his father says. ‘The last thing he wanted was to sit at a desk in his unit. He would have had his fill of operations with the NSG. He could talk of nothing else in his last six months.’

  David leaves behind a legacy of loyal sources that continue to help his unit hunt terrorists in Nagaland. His football-driven connect with civilians in the area is being carried forward despite his loss. Four days after his death, the North East United Football Club (NEUFC) paid tribute to David, hailing his ‘outstanding act of bravery’.

  ‘No doubt, football was in his blood, and he had a large female fan following too,’ remembers Col. Mishra. ‘When he was company commander in Mokokchung, he cultivated many sources who were women. He had this idea that women are the most reliable sources of intelligence. It helped that he was a charmer and they loved him. I know David did not like to be bound by rules and regulations and methods.’

  During his final days, David had experimented with a new haircut, shaving one full side of his head. His CO had laughed, asking what he was hoping to achieve with the new look. ‘It may give the impression that I’m not serious, Sir,’ he said with a wink. ‘It will be good if others think that.’

  In the months after his passing, David’s identity would cause complications in the family’s wish to build a house. As Manipuris—and not Khasis—the law forbids them from buying land in Meghalaya despite having lived there for decades. The Army unveiled a memorial bust of David in Shillong, but his parents were prohibited from owning land on account of ethno-political fault lines.

  ‘For all practical purposes, David was from Shillong, and he was a local hero,’ says Col. Mishra. ‘But instead of accepting him fully as a hero, the community fault lines come into play. The Army tried to help the family get clearance to buy land either in Meghalaya or Manipur. After hitting many walls, the family has now purchased a plot of land in Guwahati, where they are building a house.’

  On 27 March 2018, Khamzalam and Mannuamniang travelled to Delhi to receive their son’s posthumous Kirti Chakra from the President of India. His citation would declare that the young officer had displayed ‘conspicuous personal bravery and leadership of the highest order’ in his final mission.

  On his final night in Delhi before leaving to join the Army, David had been drinking with a friend, who asked him, ‘So you think you’re ready for this? It’s not fun and games, mate.’

  David bottoms-upped his drink, narrowed his eyes into a grinning grimace and replied, ‘I’ve been ready since the day I was born.’

  5

  ‘Get to the Upper Decks, Don’t Come Back’

  Lieutenant Commander Kapish Muwal and Lieutenant Manoranjan Kumar

  Mumbai

  14 August 2013

  The explosion lit up the sky over Colaba in south Mumbai. Those who didn’t hear the sickening blast saw it from miles away. A massive ball of angry flames rose into the air, followed by a fountain of projectile explosions that could be mistaken for celebratory fireworks by those observing it from far away. The blast settled into a roaring blaze that would send up an ominous cone of orange light into the sky, as if a portal to hell had opened up on the ground. Not until later that night of 14 August 2013 would Mumbai know what that blast really was.

  It was the INS Sindhurakshak .

  The Indian Navy attack submarine had suffered a terrifying accident in its berth at the naval dockyard, which opened out into the Arabian Sea. As the minutes passed, horrific details of the disaster began to emerge. Eighteen personnel were inside the submarine at the time of the catastrophic blast, which mutilated its double hull and sent out a thudding shockwave that shook the other ships in the cramped dockyard that night. Forty-eight hours would pass before rescue personnel could enter the carcass of the Sindhurakshak . As the Navy had feared, none of the eighteen men on board survived. Most had perished in the blast, which was later found to have been caused by a mishandled torpedo and a series of tragic lapses.

  For the Indian Navy, the tragedy reverberated in many directions. With eighteen personnel gone, it was the single biggest peacetime loss in its history, an unspeakable tragedy above all else. The eighteen personnel were all submariners, some of the hardiest and best qualified men in service, trained to function in the most difficult and dangerous conditions imaginable. The destruction of a submarine that wasn’t at war was a crushing blow—the Indian Navy had already been wrestling with a drastic depletion in its submarine fleet, and was desperate to keep the small number in service as functional as possible for the enormous responsibility that rested on its shoulders in the Indian Ocean.

  Preparing to conduct the most difficult accident investigation in its history, a shaken Navy ordered a safety stand-down, a short period of pause where all non-essential sailing would cease and the entire gamut of service safety procedures would be revised across naval bases, air stations, ships and, especially, submarines. It was to serve as a powerful refresher and reminder of just why those rules had been written in the first place, and how horribly wrong things could go if even a single rule was given a pass.

  Marine commando divers would inspect the shattered Sindhurakshak in its berth, using it for months as a training wreck for salvage operations. The submarine had returned only the previous year after a twenty-four-month overhaul and upgrade at western Russia’s Zvezdochka shipyard on the White Sea, where it had been fitted with new sensor systems, communications gear, safety rigs and modern Klub-S anti-ship and land attack cruise missiles. To the commandos swimming among the wreck, the sight below the waterline was devastating. A mangled, twisted hull breached at several points, a far cry from the silent, deadly hunter of the deep it was built to be.

  That August night in 2013, two young Navy officers had heard the explosion from their quarters in the Colaba naval area. Word quickly spread about what had happened. Lt Cdr Kapish Muwal and Lt Manoranjan Kumar, both submariners themselves, made for the naval dockyard—they personally knew most of those who were on board the Sindhurakshak —but found that the area had been cordoned off and secured for safety reasons. There was every chance that there would be more explosions, since there was no guarantee that all the armament and ordnance on board the submarine had detonated. Hurriedly heading to the naval mess, they found a large group of officers glued to a television screen. News channels had begun beaming live footage of the smouldering orange blaze over the naval dockyard and amateur mobile phone footage of the explosions from earlier.

  Nobody said a word as the TV anchor described the hellish images. As he watched, Lt Cdr Kapish’s mobile phone rang. It was his father, a retired naval officer, calling from Delhi. Over the next 15 minutes, every submariner in the officers’ mess would receive a phone call from a loved one. Lt Manoranjan’s father, a retired Subedar from the Army, called from Jamshedpur. Every one of the callers would thank their gods when their son or brother or father picked up the phone.


  ‘I’m okay, Dad, but they are saying eighteen people were inside Sindhurakshak ,’ Lt Cdr Kapish told his father. ‘There is no information yet. We are waiting. We can’t go anywhere near that place.’

  As Lt Manoranjan’s mother, Rukmani Devi, came on the line, he asked her not to worry, promising he would keep them posted.

  For eighteen other families spread across the country, phone calls to loved ones would go unanswered. Not until the next day would a full list of those who were inside the Sindhurakshak become available. And it would take another day for the Navy to announce that its worst fears were true. The Sindhurakshak had entombed a part of her crew—there were no survivors.

  For the two young officers, the tragedy hit even closer home. They were both crew on another submarine, the INS Sindhuratna , a sister vessel to the ill-fated Sindhurakshak. The two vessels were among ten Kilo-class attack submarines built by Russia’s Sevmash shipyard and delivered to India between 1986 and 2000. The Sindhuratna was nearly a decade older than the Sindhurakshak , and it wasn’t sailing for the time being—it had been dry-docked in Mumbai for crucial maintenance procedures and wouldn’t be ready to sail for at least another six months.

  Lt Cdr Kapish had joined the crew of Sindhuratna in August 2011, with Lt Manoranjan joining five months later, in January 2012. Both were electrical officers tasked with overseeing the huge quantity of electrical equipment on board—notably, the large battery pits that provide part of a diesel-electric submarine’s propulsion.

  With their submarine out of action, the two young officers would be consumed by the storm of intrigue erupting over what could have caused the Sindhurakshak disaster.

  It was all that submariners would talk about for months. And since the Navy operated ten submarines of the Sindhurakshak ’s kind, crew members of the other nine submarines—including the two young officers from Sindhuratna— were drawn, at some level or the other, into the investigation and its implications. Was there something wrong with the submarine? Could something similar happen to its sister submarines? Were standard operating procedures on the Kilo-class vessels faulty? Were maintenance procedures introducing new, undiscovered risks? Did the new systems added during extensive overhauls in Russia hamper the safety regime on board? These and countless more questions would overwhelm the daily lives of the Navy’s small submarine arm in the aftermath of the Sindhurakshak catastrophe.

  In the military, there is barely any time or luxury to mourn lost comrades. But if the comfort of routine served as a salve to the wounded submarine arm, it would, at the time, be unaware that the next tragedy was only six months away.

  In January 2014, Lt Cdr Kapish visited his parents in Delhi to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday. A day before, on 18 January, the Navy’s Kilo-class submarine fleet would have a major scare. The lead submarine of the pack, INS Sindhughosh , touched the seabed while entering the naval dockyard in Mumbai, stranded by a combination of low tide and lack of desilting and dredging work in the harbour approach. While the incident was a serious lapse that sent alarm bells ringing, the submarine itself suffered no damage and nobody on board was hurt. What the incident did was remind the submarine arm again how delicate their operations were.

  ‘Why do you need to work on these submarines?’ Lt Cdr Kapish’s younger brother, Ashish, would ask him during that break.

  ‘Somebody has to do it, and I enjoy it,’ Lt Cdr Kapish had said. ‘It’s difficult, but I’ve chosen this.’

  His mother, Dayawati Singh, who tried not to let her worry show, put all her energy into trying to persuade her son to think about getting married. Before his birthday on 19 January, she had even managed to get him to meet prospective brides.

  The officer remained non-committal, playing along for his parents’ sake and hoping it would at least alleviate some of their worry. He knew there was little he could really say to take their minds off the horrors of Sindhurakshak , but he did have news he felt would comfort them. His three-year tenure with the Sindhuratna would, after all, end in August that year, and he had been told that he would be sent by the Navy to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, to do an MTech degree in electrical engineering. His parents were exultant. His father, Cdr Ishwar Singh, a naval veteran himself, knew this meant the Indian Navy had seen promise in their son, and was investing in upgrading his skills with a prestigious degree.

  It was gratifying for his parents for another reason. Kapish, a high-ranking student in school, had got admission to Delhi’s prestigious St Stephen’s College for physics, but had chosen to leave after only six months to take up an engineering degree, since his real intention was to join the Navy. He had worked very hard to get into one of India’s finest colleges, so his parents wondered if he was certain about the path he was choosing. Kapish would prove just how committed he was when he was adjudged best cadet at the Naval Academy, and awarded the Sword of Honour by the Chief of Naval Staff. Backing him for an MTech degree now was an enormous show of faith by the Navy.

  Feeling recharged after a week with his family, Lt Cdr Kapish returned to Mumbai, ready to dive back into his work.

  The Sindhuratna was nearing the end of her refit and would be ready to sail by mid-February. With sailing duties back on the horizon, Lt Manoranjan also took a short break to visit his parents in Jamshedpur.

  As an electrical watchkeeping officer on the submarine, Lt Manoranjan was living a childhood dream. In class V at the Army Public School in Bareilly, where his Armyman father was posted at the time, Manoranjan had come home after watching a military demonstration on his campus on the occasion of Republic Day. He had told his parents that there was nothing he wanted more than to wear a uniform. His father, Subedar Navin Kumar, had given the usual advice: study hard, pay attention in school, do well, and you can choose whatever you want to be. Manoranjan would top his class in senior school, train with the Navy’s engineering and electrical establishments and join the Indian Navy in 2009. Three years later, he would join the crew of the Sindhuratna .

  Back in Mumbai, the two young officers, along with over ninety other men who comprised the Sindhuratna ’s complement, waited for their submarine to be lowered back into the water. The 2300-ton hunk of metal had been out of action for months, and the crew couldn’t wait to get back inside and stretch its legs out in the Arabian Sea.

  When the day finally arrived for Sindhuratna to be put back into the sea from her dry dock, the anxious crew assembled at Mumbai’s naval dockyard. One thousand four hundred kilometres away, another submariner, an alumnus of the Sindhuratna , was also closely tracking the events as they unfolded.

  Commodore Ravi Dhingra had begun his underwater career on the Sindhuratna , doing his entire initial training on it. Many of the younger officers who were part of the crew in February 2014 were personnel he had trained. And since his duties at the Naval Headquarters were directly related to the submarine fleet, he was keeping daily tabs on what was going on.

  ‘Sindhuratna had been in refit for some time and when the submarine comes out of refit, officers and sailors have not bonded for months as a full sailing unit,’ says Commodore Ravi. ‘To get back into action mode, to be able to handle any kind of requirement or emergency, the crew goes through something called a “work-up”. It begins with a harbour phase and then out at sea. The crew essentially carries out various drills involving simulated emergencies like a fire or smoke in a compartment. They practise safety procedures like de-energizing compartments and restoring the delicate balance to the submarine so all the other functions work fine.’

  On 19 February, with Capt. Sandip Sinha in command, Lt Cdr Kapish and Lt Manoranjan embarked the Sindhuratna with the rest of her crew for its first sail out to sea since the refit. For the next five days, the submarine would conduct a series of manoeuvres and trials, returning to its dock on 24 February. According to established procedure, the crew of the Sindhuratna needed to demonstrate that the post-refit ‘work-up’ had been satisfactorily completed. For this, the Western Naval Co
mmand’s senior-most submariner, the Commodore Commanding Submarines (COMCOS), Commodore S.R. Kapoor, would embark and sail with them for what the Navy calls a Task-II examination, 1 a crucial step before the submarine is cleared for operations.

  At 7.30 p.m. on 25 February, before setting sail, Lt Cdr Kapish called his parents. They didn’t pick up. He called again. Maybe they were busy, he thought. So he sent them a text message saying he would be out at sea and unreachable for the next few days, and they should not worry.

  The crew of the Sindhuratna was upbeat that evening. They were finally ready to prove they had held together professionally and were ready to handle the submarine in all respects.

  Kilo-class attack submarine

  ‘The purpose of the Task-II was to practically demonstrate what kind of training level the crew had achieved,’ says Commodore Ravi. ‘So on the evening of 25 February, with the COMCOS on board, the Sindhuratna sailed out. During the evening, when they were leaving Mumbai harbour, and also that night, simulated emergencies were being given to the submarine’s crew. That’s how it works.’

  In submarines, the crews work in shifts, since the vessel’s stations can never be left unmanned. The night passed as Sindhuratna sailed, at a depth of 40 m, 110 km out into the Arabian Sea. As one part of the crew climbed into their ‘slot in the wall’ cabins—a signature of the highly cramped interiors of the Kilo-class design—the other part manned the submarine, sailing it further out for what would be a long day of tests the following day.

  ‘Everything was calm that night,’ remembers a sailor who was in Compartment 3 of the Sindhuratna. ‘Lt Manoranjan was on duty as the electrical officer-in-charge in Compartment 3, and Lt Cdr Kapish, the deputy electrical officer (DLO), was at his post in Compartment 5.’

  The quiet hum of the submarine, as it coursed through the water 40 m deep, was about to be dramatically interrupted.