Destined for the scrapyard

A dirge sounded on September 19 through both the Indian and Royal navies as Viraat, the world’s oldest aircraft carrier when it was decommissioned in 2017 and which had served both the navies with aplomb, started on its final journey, of three days, from the naval dockyard in Mumbai to a ship-breaking yard 150 nautical miles up the coast.

A Centaur class aircraft carrier, the 28,700-tonne INS Viraat (former HMS Hermes) had been built by Vickers-Armstrong and originally commissioned in the Royal Navy in 1959. It had the distinction of serving as the UK’s taskforce flagship during the conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982. It had a royal connection as well, with Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, having done his midshipman training in 1974 with the 845 Naval Air Squadron of helicopters embarked aboard the carrier.

Following its purchase by India in 1987 after being mothballed for three years, INS Viraat (meaning ‘giant’ in Sanskrit) played a stellar role with the Indian Navy as well, spearheading the Indian Peace Keeping Force’s Operation Pawan in 1987 and Operation Jupiter in 1989, both in Sri Lanka, and in Operation Vijay in 1999, for enlarging India’s presence in the Arabian Sea during the Kargil War in the Himalayas between India and Pakistan. It besides had the distinction of having four of its Commanding Officers go on to become India’s Chiefs of Naval Staff, namely, Admirals Madhvendra Singh, Arun Prakash, Nirmal Verma and DK Joshi.

INS Viraat’s operational life of 58 years – 28 years with the Royal Navy and 30 years with the Indian Navy – gained it the Guinness record for having been the longest serving aircraft carrier in the world. Indeed, it may well be the longest serving warship in the world, if one discounts USS Constitution that was commissioned in 1797 and is retained entirely for historical reasons on the US Navy ship roster.

Under the Indian flag alone, INS Viraat had clocked 22,622 flying hours by its various aircraft, and had spent 2,252 days at sea, sailing an overall 5,88,287 nautical miles, or 10,94,215 km. By this reckoning, it had been at sea for over six years and had sailed round the globe 27 times.

These hallowed honours seemed to vaporise when the hulking carrier, after being paid off from service, remained berthed at the naval dockyard’s South Breakwater for three years as the government wrung its hands off proposals to preserve this record-bearing ship as a museum-cum-heritage site to keep the nation’s maritime memories alive and as a tribute to its naval history.

One government proposal, of 2018, for converting the flatdeck into India’s first moored maritime museum and marine adventure centre to be located on the palm-fringed shores of Sindhudurg, 330 km south of Mumbai, deterred bidders because of the prohibitive costs. The private sector too pondered over options for a while, but eventually nothing materialised.

An auction held last December failed to find any buyers for the vessel, by then rendered into a ‘dumb barge’, having been stripped bare of its machinery and operational equipment. A repeat auction in July secured a winning bid from the Gujarat-based Shree Ram Group that purchased it for Rs38.54 crore (about £4 million).

Group chairman Mukesh Patel says the vessel now weighs about half its original weight and the steel that it will yield will be sold to steel rolling mills across the country. After various procedures, dismantling the ship will commence at the Alang ship-breaking yard – the world’s largest – after about a month and will take nine to 12 months thereafter, he mentions. Patel’s is a family business that is engaged in ship-recycling, construction, and cryogenic manufacturing.

INS Viraat’s commissioning Commanding Officer, retired Vice Admiral Vinod Pasricha (who was Captain then), remembers heading for Plymouth, on the south coast of Devon, in England, in May 1986 along with the commissioning crew of 29 officers and 180 sailors as the then mothballed ship was being readied at the Devonport Dockyard for its recommissioning with the Indian Navy nine months later. They were soon visited on board by the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, who seemed convinced that the ship would not be ready to sail for at least the next three years.

“The Viraat crew not only proved him wrong, but also the Royal Naval team, who let us know that we would be lucky if we kept her operational for seven more years,” remarks Pasricha. He also remembers that while everyone desired some relaxation after working long hours at the dockyard, the Indian Navy does not allow a bar on ship, unlike the Royal Navy. Bars ashore were priced beyond the men’s limited sanctioned allowances.

“So as to not break any rule, and yet resolve the issue, the dockyard was kind enough to give us a large room on the jetty that we converted into a bar on weekends,” he says. A local travel agent besides provided them reasonably priced weekend trips by bus to Paris, Rome and other tourist spots.

He, as all his naval brethren, had hoped for a resurrection of the Viraat as a maritime museum, but ultimately it met the same fate as the 19,500-tonne INS Vikrant (former HMS Hercules), also acquired from Britain, in 1961, and which had served the Indian Navy as its flagship for 26 years, from 1961 until its retirement in 1987. Vikrant too, which had been the first aircraft carrier in an Asian navy, had been disposed off to a scrap dealer in Mumbai, its steel sold to the Bajaj conglomerate that christened its 150 cc model motorcycle manufactured from the steel as Bajaj V15, V for Vikrant.

“Lament, my friends, as an important piece of our (and also Britain’s) naval history sails towards a scrap-yard,” remarked a retired naval chief. “Any country would have made every effort and would have been proud to retain such a glorious ship as a museum ship, but we have consigned this warhorse to the scrap heap, a 76-year maritime history peddled for Rs38.54 crore!”