Sinking of PNS Ghazi (1971)

A lone submarine’s shadow

For navies, the sea is both an arena of power and a place that swallows secrets. In late 1971, PNS Ghazi moved through that margin between visibility and vanishing. Built in the United States during the Second World War and later transferred and recommissioned for Pakistan, Ghazi was no longer a brand‑new boat — her rivets and steel remembered another century of conflict — but she carried a capability Pakistan urgently needed: long range, endurance, and the ability to operate far from home. In wartime, a single submarine can represent disproportionate threat; sent alone into a distant theater, it can also become an impossible risk.

The Ghazi left port under wartime orders in late November, alone and under cover. Her task was stark and strategic: penetrate the Bay of Bengal, find INS Vikrant — the aircraft carrier whose air power threatened seaborne Pakistani lines — and, if possible, neutralize her. She was also to lay mines in the approaches to Visakhapatnam, a move that would hamper Indian naval operations and logistics. It was the kind of mission that asked for stealth, endurance, and the little things submariners call patience and luck. The ocean gives neither easily.

Why Visakhapatnam mattered

In December 1971 the Indo‑Pakistani conflict was at a decisive point. The struggle in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) had escalated into open war. The Indian Navy had extended its reach into the Bay of Bengal, and the presence of INS Vikrant — a carrier capable of launching aircraft to strike ports, convoys and coastal targets — altered calculations. For Pakistan, neutralizing Vikrant would remove a major threat to its western ports and shipping. For India, Vikrant’s presence enabled blockades and sea control that supported operations on land.

Naval planners on both sides watched one another like chess players watching hands. For Pakistan, Ghazi represented the chance to strike at the fulcrum of Indian maritime power. For India, any submarine contact near Visakhapatnam demanded an immediate and forceful anti‑submarine response.

The night the sea changed

Ghazi’s approach to the eastern coast unfolded over several days. By 2–3 December she was in the Bay of Bengal, operating submerged and trying to find the carrier or a position to lay mines. On the night of 3–4 December 1971, in the shallow waters off the approaches to Visakhapatnam, Indian coastal and naval units detected what they believed to be an underwater contact. Indian warships and coastal anti‑submarine units engaged with depth charges and mortars. In Indian official accounts, those actions were decisive: after hours of search and attack, debris, oil slicks and other surface evidence appeared, and the Indian Navy credited its ASW (anti‑submarine warfare) action with destroying the intruder.

Pakistan’s narrative — and the reconstruction many researchers would later find plausible — took a different shape. In Islamabad and among some historians, the explanation favored an internal catastrophe aboard Ghazi: an accidental explosion, possibly related to mine handling or ordnance, which detonated inside the pressure hull and sank the boat without a direct enemy hit. The same fragments of evidence — sudden catastrophe, debris at the surface, no survivors — can point to either story. What they cannot do, by themselves, is prove one or the other beyond reasonable doubt.

The crew and the cost

When Ghazi did not return, the grim arithmetic became clear. The submarine was lost with all hands. Contemporary reporting and naval records most commonly put the number of dead at 92, including her commanding officer, Commander Zafar Mohammad Khan. The names on the manifest were young and old, seasoned submariners and sailors pulled into a long, solitary mission. Those who served on submarines speak of the intimacy of a crew — the small, sealed world beneath the waves — which makes a complete loss a particular kind of tragedy for families and for a service.

Materially, Pakistan lost its principal long‑range undersea platform. In the short term, that narrowed Pakistan’s options in the Bay of Bengal and removed an instrument of deterrence and disruption. Strategically, the presence of the Indian carrier and the broader Indian naval campaign continued without having to reckon with Ghazi in the equation.

Conflicting evidence and the limits of certainty

In the days that followed, Indian ships reported oil slicks, floating wreckage and other signs consistent with submarine destruction in the area where their ASW units had attacked. Indian authorities later produced coordinates and statements asserting they had located and examined the wreck. Pakistani authorities, facing the loss of a prized vessel and 92 lives, conducted their own inquiries that emphasized the plausibility of an onboard explosion. Analysts who have revisited the wreck and the incident since have pointed to different features in the hull and surrounding debris that can be read either as the result of an external depth‑charge attack or as signs of a catastrophic internal blast.

The case of Ghazi illustrates a hard lesson of naval forensic history: the sea is a poor witness. Saltwater corrodes evidence, depth can shift remains, and battlefields beneath the waves often leave behind ambiguous traces. In this instance, there are credible, documented claims on both sides. Indian naval records describe and claim an anti‑submarine victory; Pakistani records and later research emphasize the dangers of ordnance and mine handling and the possibility that such an accident doomed Ghazi. Decades later, the public record lacks a single, incontrovertible forensic conclusion that reconciles every discrepancy. Historians and naval professionals therefore treat the loss as factually clear — the boat sank, and everyone aboard died — while the proximate cause remains disputed.

Immediate response and later inquiries

Indian patrols, coastal units and hydrographic teams searched the area, gathered surface evidence and maintained security around Visakhapatnam during the following days. Indian accounts hold that divers and naval teams examined debris and located the wreck on the seabed. Pakistani naval investigators reviewed logs, orders and the limited communications the submarine had made before she went silent. Both services used the episode to revise procedures: submarine safety checks, ordnance handling practices, and doctrines governing single‑ship, long‑range covert missions were revisited. The incident reinforced the value of coordinated ASW readiness and the risks inherent in sending lone submarines deep into hostile waters.

Memory, meaning and maritime lessons

Losses like Ghazi’s accumulate meaning over time. In Pakistan the submarine became a symbol of sacrifice and an emblem of naval tragedy; memorials and official remembrances mark the hole the boat left in the fleet and in the lives of families. In Indian naval memory, the episode has been recalled as a successful counter‑submarine operation that neutralized a threat in the approaches to a vital port. Popular narratives on both sides have framed the story in patriotic terms; scholarly treatments tend to be more cautious, emphasizing the ambiguity of evidence and the operational lessons.

Those lessons are practical and stark. Submarines operating far from friendly support, alone, increase the chances that a single accident — mechanical failure, ordnance mishap, navigational error — or a single enemy contact will end the patrol catastrophically. The risk calculus of such missions requires robust planning, support and contingency measures. Likewise, the Ghazi episode emphasized ASW capability as a force multiplier; even limited anti‑submarine assets, when effectively deployed, can change the calculus for a submarine prowling shallow coastal waters.

What we hold onto now

The outlines of the story are not in dispute: Ghazi sailed into the Bay of Bengal in late November 1971 on a covert mission to confront or interdict INS Vikrant and to mine approaches to Visakhapatnam. On the night of 3–4 December she was lost off Visakhapatnam with the death of her entire complement, including Commander Zafar Mohammad Khan. What remains unsettled, and likely to remain so in the absence of new forensic evidence, is the precise mechanism of her destruction. Indian official histories credit depth‑charge attacks; Pakistani accounts and some technical analyses point to an internal explosion.

A ship that disappears into the deep resists tidy closure. For historians, sailors and families, the Ghazi story is a compound of operational fact and human loss, of strategy and sorrow. It is a reminder that at sea, as in war, the line between deliberate action and the accident of fate can be thin — and that the decisions commanders make in that thin space shape both immediate outcomes and the stories nations tell afterward.