Did a single Indian submarine bottle up the Pakistani navy?

I have always been keen on defense matters but living in Chennai I had been unable to meet any defense analysts. One day I decided to ask Google chacha if there were any defense analysts in Chennai and to my surprise I was told that there was quite a large number of them in Chennai and it even gave the number of one of them. I promptly dialed the number and a guarded voice came on line to tell me that he was in the middle of a memorial service and that I was to call him a couple of hours later. That’s how I came to speak to Commodore Shekhar  about defense matters with particular regard to the Navy and when I asked him if he would be ready to discuss it on camera he readily agreed. He made it clear to me that since he had left the Navy over twenty years ago he was not privy to sensitive information but being a keen observer and as one who continued to take an interest on matters Naval he had an opinion which he was ready to share. 

On he appointed day and at the appointed time Commodore Shekar walked into our studio. I mentioned to him that years ago when I was an apprentice officer in the Shipping Corporation of India I had met a naval officer named Lt Franklin at Vizag (Later on I came to know that Franklin’s parents and mine had known each other). Anyway Lt Franklin had invited me into his sub that was undergoing some maintenance work. I can still remember the cramped quarters within the steel tube. I remember being amazed to see that the crew of the submarine slept in bunks (or were they hammocks?) rigged up between the torpedoes. My ship the M. T. Desh Bandhu was a tanker of about 26,000 tons engaged in carrying crude oil from Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and Vizag.

That was my only experience of submarines other than seeing movies like ‘The hunt for Red October’. Now here I had a submariner with vast experience to talk to and I was impatient to start. Commodore Shekhar had served as the Electrical Officer in the Indian submarine Kursura that had bottled up the Pakistani Navy inside Karachi harbour in the 1971 war with Pakistan.

Watch the other talks with Commodore Shekhar here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDpz-jpTRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alwbJdKxZJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuhd4q2PncE