Three Indian Missile Boats Sank a Destroyer and a Minesweeper Off Karachi on the Night of 4 December 1971, and the Navy Then Blockaded Both Coasts of Pakistan

On the night of 4 to 5 December 1971, three Indian missile boats, Nipat, Nirghat and Veer, fired Styx missiles at ships off Karachi, the port that served as the Pakistan Navy’s home base. The Ministry of Defence’s official history of the war says the destroyer PNS Khaibar and the minesweeper PNS Muhafiz were sunk and that the Indian force returned without loss or damage. The Pakistan Navy’s own history agrees that both ships went down. The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press agency, says the Indian Navy keeps 4 December as Navy Day to commemorate that night.

The order was to strike Karachi on the first night

The political story, from the 1970 election to the surrender at Dhaka, is in our account of the 1971 war. The official history says the Western Naval Command, based at Bombay under Vice Admiral S.N. Kohli, planned “a bold and direct thrust” at Karachi when hostilities began. The Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral S.M. Nanda, told his commanders to seek and destroy all enemy warships. Bombay had built warships for the Royal Navy in the early 1800s, as our article on the Bombay Dockyard tells.

The newest weapon was the missile boat. The history says the Soviet Union had designed these boats mainly for coastal defence and that the Navy chose to use them offensively. PIB says they came from the USSR on heavy-lift merchant ships and were commissioned at Kolkata in early 1971. Each carried four Styx missiles, with the fourth held back for any retaliation, the history says.

The strike was planned for 3 December, the day the Pakistan Air Force attacked Indian airfields, but the force could not reach its launch point that evening and went the next night. Pakistan had told merchant ships to stay away from Karachi between dusk and dawn. The official history gives the distance as 70 nautical miles (a nautical mile is about 1.85 kilometres) and Kohli’s book, quoted by Hiranandani, gives 75. Indian planners therefore treated any radar contact inside that line as a warship.

The night of 4 December, ship by ship

Vice Admiral G.M. Hiranandani (retired) describes the force in the Indian Defence Review, drawing on Kohli’s book and Gopal Rao’s account. Two Petya-class frigates, Kiltan and Katchall, escorted the boats to supply radar and communications and to tow or refuel one if needed. A fourth boat stayed on patrol off Dwarka to cover the return. Commander K.P. Gopal Rao in Kiltan commanded the task group, and Commander B.B. Yadav, who led the boat squadron, was aboard Nipat. By Gopal Rao’s account the group turned north about 150 miles from Karachi at about 1800.

At about 70 miles south of the port, Kiltan’s radar showed a warship to the north-west and a large ship to the north-east. Nirghat fired two missiles at the warship, which turned out to be Khaibar. Gopal Rao says the first hit her boiler room and cut her speed to eight knots, and that she sank about 45 minutes later, about 35 miles south-south-west of Karachi. Nipat fired two at the other ship. Hiranandani says Lloyd’s Register named it as the Pakistan-chartered Venus Challenger and that she was later learnt to be carrying US ammunition from Saigon. Veer fired one at a third contact, Muhafiz, which burned for more than 70 minutes before sinking about 19 miles south of Karachi.

Nipat then fired a missile towards the port at about midnight, and Yadav ordered the boats home. The ships refuelled on the Saurashtra coast on 5 December and reached Bombay on 6 December, Hiranandani writes. PIB records “no casualties” on the Indian side.

Two histories of the same night

Hiranandani prints long extracts from The Story of the Pakistan Navy, which gives the other side. It says the surveillance radar on Manora Island picked up the force at 2010, and that the missiles were mistaken for aircraft. Khaibar was hit on the starboard side at about 2245 and again at about 2249, was abandoned between 2300 and 2315 and went down at about 2320. Muhafiz, a wooden ship, was hit at about 2305 and disintegrated, throwing some of her crew into the water. The gunboat Sadaqat rescued survivors, and a Khaibar life raft was recovered at 1745 on 5 December.

The Indian official history puts the first missile at 2313, about half an hour after the Pakistani account’s 2245. Neither gives a death toll. Captain Sethi, an Indian officer who served in the war, writes that more than 200 crew were aboard Khaibar.

The Pakistan Navy history counts the hits the same way, two missiles on Khaibar and one on Muhafiz. It calls Indian claims for the destroyer Shah Jahan, two minesweepers and a merchant ship exaggerated, and says Shah Jahan was recalled and so saved. ThePrint, in 2017, credited Nipat with damaging her. The oil tanks at Keamari are the larger gap. The official history says Nipat’s midnight missile caused a major fire in the harbour. Gopal Rao wrote later that he saw that missile travel west of Karachi and hit the sea. The Pakistan Navy history says two Keamari tanks had caught fire in an air attack at 0830 earlier that day, and Hiranandani reads it as crediting the Indian Air Force.

Hiranandani also records that Gopal Rao and Yadav could not agree on a joint report. The disagreement turned on who was in command of the attack once the contacts were sunk. Gopal Rao recalls that Kohli, pleased that the warships had been sunk, decided against an inquiry. The official history records Maha Vir Chakras for both officers.

Operation Python on 8 and 9 December

On the forenoon of 8 December the Western Fleet, about 250 miles south-west of Karachi, split into three groups, Sethi writes. The Karachi group was the missile boat Vinash with the frigates Trishul and Talwar.

Vinash fired four Styx missiles. The official history says the first two hit merchant ships, the third hit the Pakistan Navy tanker PNS Dacca and the fourth flew inland and set the Keamari oil installation on fire. The flames were visible from 60 nautical miles. Air Force pilots who bombed the harbour next morning called it “the biggest bloody bonfire in Asia”, the history says, and it quotes eyewitnesses that the fire burned for seven days and nights. Sethi lists the hits in another order and names a British ship, Hamilton, and a Panamanian ship, Gulf Star, which he says sank within minutes. The Pakistan Navy history, as Hiranandani quotes it, says the first missile crashed into an oil tank at Keamari and relit fires that crews had put out only the day before, after three days’ work.

The sources differ on Dacca. PIB’s 2021 release says she was sunk. The official history says she was damaged and spent a long time in dry dock. Aaj News, a Pakistani outlet, says she survived and that the merchant ship Harmattan sank.

Farther west, the Makran group seized the Pakistani merchant ship Madhumati, which was posing as a Philippine vessel. The Fleet Commander, Rear Admiral E.C. Kuruvila, recognised her master as a man who had served under him in the Royal Indian Navy before partition, the history says. By 10 December, it adds, all Pakistani merchant ships had put into neutral ports and neutral ships in Karachi were asking New Delhi for permission to leave. ThePrint reports that a CIA memo, released in 2016 and heavily redacted, judged Pakistan’s oil and ammunition supplies badly threatened by the blockade.

The blockade of East Pakistan and the Chittagong coast

The Eastern Fleet was small. The official history lists one carrier, two anti-aircraft frigates and two anti-submarine vessels, with Vikrant’s boilers limiting her speed. Her story is in our article on INS Vikrant. Eight Sea Hawks left the carrier at 1030 on 4 December to strike the Cox’s Bazar airfield, and another eight were launched at 1515 against Chittagong.

The blockade of East Pakistan’s coast was declared from 1400 on 4 December, and contraband control began at the same hour. According to the official history it led to 13 ships being seized between 4 and 11 December. On 9 December INS Rajput stopped a ship that claimed to be Japanese and found a Pakistani vessel carrying 56 people, 17 of them soldiers.

PIB’s 2020 Navy Day release says the missile strikes at Karachi and the air attacks from Vikrant together led to the defeat of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan. The official history says the carrier’s aircraft flew 291 sorties between 3 and 16 December. Of 31 ships and coasters attacked, 14 were destroyed or badly damaged, and of 17 gunboats, six were sunk or put out of action. Lieutenant General J.S. Aurora, the Army commander in the east, told the carrier’s crew the Navy had “reduced the task of the Army threefold”, the history records.

PNS Ghazi off Visakhapatnam

The official history says Pakistan’s one submarine in the Bay of Bengal, Ghazi, sailed from Karachi on 14 November. A signal of 25 November told her to take her patrol zone at once because intelligence put the carrier in port at Visakhapatnam. The Eastern Naval Command had encouraged that belief by booking berths and ordering stores there for a carrier that was hundreds of miles away.

Rajput left Visakhapatnam harbour before midnight on 3 December with the navigational aids switched off. Her commander, Lieutenant Commander Inder Singh, dropped depth charges on a disturbance in the water, and a loud explosion was heard ashore soon afterwards. On 5 December INS Akshay found the wreck about three miles off the harbour entrance, in 30 metres of water, with her bow blown off. Divers recovered a clock stopped at 0015.

The cause is where the accounts divide. The official history gives Rajput’s attack and then quotes Vice Admiral N. Krishnan’s alternative: Ghazi crash-dived, hit the seabed and her weapons exploded. It says a Pakistani general put the loss down to an accident while she carried mines, calls that explanation misleading because she was lying in wait for Vikrant, and concludes that whether the seabed or the depth charges caused the blast is “unlikely to be resolved”. Sebastien Roblin of The National Interest writes that most independent analyses read the damage as an internal explosion and that Pakistani accounts insist on an accident. No one aboard survived.

INS Khukri and PNS Hangor

The Navy lost the anti-submarine frigate Khukri on the night of 9 to 10 December. She and Kirpan had left Bombay on 8 December to cover the withdrawing missile boats. The official history says three torpedoes hit her 35 nautical miles south-west of Diu Head and she sank within minutes. She took down 18 officers and 176 men, among them her captain, Mahendra Nath Mulla. The history credits Mulla with saving many of his sailors before he went down with the ship. Katchall and Kirpan picked up 67 survivors, six officers and 61 sailors.

Pakistan’s Aaj News names the submarine as PNS Hangor, under Commander Ahmed Tasnim, and gives the same crew losses. It says she fired one homing torpedo and evaded a four-day hunt, returning to Karachi on 18 December. The state news agency APP says her crew received four Sitara-e-Jurrat among other awards, and that Kirpan was crippled. The official history says Kirpan fired her anti-submarine mortars and was not struck, and that the Indian search for the submarine was abandoned on the evening of 13 December.

Navy Day

The official history says the Arabian Sea operations earned three Maha Vir Chakras, for Gopal Rao, Yadav and Mulla. PIB says the boat squadron’s battle honours include one Maha Vir Chakra, seven Vir Chakras and eight Nausena Medals (Gallantry), and its 2021 release announced that the squadron, known as the Killers, would receive the President’s Standard at Mumbai on 8 December.