INS Sindhuratna captain to face court martial

NEW DELHI: The captain of INS Sindhuratna will now face a general court martial (GCM) for the mishap on board his Kilo-class submarine, which killed two officers, injured several sailors and proved to be the final trigger for Admiral D K Joshi to resign as Navy chief in February last year.

While Commander Sandeep Sinha will undergo disciplinary action in the GCM, six other officers have been awarded “severe displeasure" -a black-mark in their records preventing any promotion, foreign posting, course and the like for them for two years.

The Commodore Commanding Submarines of Western Naval Command, S R Kapoor, and two of his officers are among the six to face the administrative action.They were on board INS Sindhuratna for “Task-II trials“ to clear the 26-year-old submarine for operational deployment -after a refit for Rs 200 crore at Mumbai naval dockyard -when disaster struck on February 26. The probe showed a cable fire over the battery pit in the submarine's third compartment led to the thick toxic smoke on board the vessel, as was first reported by TOI.

Around 40 officers are in the dock -most of them facing GCMs -for the string of warship mishaps in just the last couple of years. Defence minister Manohar Parrikar also wants accountability to be firmly fixed for submarine INS Sindhurakshak's sinking at the Mumbai dockyard after internal explosions in August 2013, which killed three officers and 15 sailors. But the Navy is yet to finalize the inquiry report into this mishap.

The INS Sindhuratna case bring outs how several factors are increasingly coming together to create a crisis in the blue-water force, tasked with guarding India's huge strategic interests in the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait. Politico-bureaucratic apathy in clearing new projects and emergency purchases, for instance, is making the Navy flog ageing warships well beyond their operational lives. Submarines, for instance, have a design life of only 25 years.