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Exorcising the Ghost of Vasco Da Gama: The
Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004
Rear Admiral R Chopra, VSM (Retd
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European Domination of the Indian Ocean
W ith the arrival of the
Europeans starting with Vasco da Gama, the Indian Ocean was never
again the same; peaceful trade and cross-cultural exchanges that had
existed over millennia amongst its peoples came to an end. In the
European colonial struggle that ensued the British eventually came out
on top and the Ocean remained a British lake until 1957 when they
eventually withdrew from ‘East of Suez’ handing over the mantle to the
United States.
The US in turn took illegal possession of the
British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) carved out of Mauritius and
established a naval and logistics base, an ‘unsinkable aircraft
carrier’, on the island of Diego Garcia. Thereafter, based on
inaccurate and incomplete Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports of
possible Soviet designs on the energy resources of the Middle East,
many ‘Red Storm Rising’ type of scenarios were conjured and there
followed creeping military deployments in the Indian Ocean and Persian
Gulf starting with the constitution of the Rapid Deployment Force and
culminating in the establishment of Central Command. The US navy
continues to be the major combatant force in the region supporting
ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
1498: Da Gama Sights India
In early April 1498, da Gama was sailing up and
down the Swahili East African coast on his flagship, the ‘San
Gabriel’ with a tiny fleet of two caravels 1
as escorts desperately seeking information on how to get to India and
thus be gone to his final destination. He had sworn to his king that
he would reach Calicut, but his crew were homesick and were aware that
India was several weeks more sailing away. All the Swahili mariners he
had earlier, tried to persuade to pilot his tiny fleet to India had
refused outright, either through fear or defiance, ‘even though they
were put to torture’.2
So it had been a great relief to da Gama when he
recruited a willing pilot, experienced in making the crossing. In
Malindi, his fortunes had changed. 3
The Sultan produced a Gujarati sea captain possibly of mixed Arab
extraction, whose name was written down as Malema Can or Canaqua4.
This elderly ‘Moor of Gujarat’ was well acquainted with the route to
Calicut and declared himself willing to guide the Christian newcomers.5
He displayed his navigational aids for finding positions at sea, had a
chart of the western side of India, and was in no way over-awed when
shown an astrolobe.
The Sultan of Malindi with great relief bade the
cruel Portuguese admiral farewell, and their pilot set course for the
northeast, keeping within sight of the African coast. Soon the land
began to change, from the lush greenery of palms and mangrove trees to
dry arid beaches. However, da Gama’s crews were cheered to discern
from the stars that they had once again crossed the Equator (first
crossed eight months earlier on the southward passage in the Atlantic)
and were in their own northern hemisphere whence they could see
Polaris and no longer had to rely on Canopus and the Southern Cross
for navigation as they had in the southern latitudes.
After five days the ships reached a long beach
known to the pilot as the ‘Saif al-Tawil’, and there he turned away
from Africa and steered almost due east for India keeping their
latitude from the Pole star. 6
The navigational instruments he used, and his cheerful self-confidence
impressed the Portuguese sailors knowing as they did that their fate
lay in his hands. After twenty-three days of good weather and
propelled by the ‘khrareef’ monsoon winds7,
the lookouts shouted that the coast of India was in sight.
The date was 18 May 1498, da Gama had fulfilled his
destiny after the longest sea voyage in history. Just to place this
date in historical perspective, Babur, born on 14 February 1483, was
15 years old in Samarkand and the Lodhi dynasty were in command in
Delhi. 8
The pilot had made his landfall a short distance
north of Calicut at Mount Deli (now the site of the new prestigious
Naval Academy, INS Zamorin). The depth was sounded at forty-five
fathoms, then the ships turned south amid thunderstorms. When they
anchored off Calicut, it was exactly as they would have been led to
expect from the accounts by previous European travellers including
Marco Polo, who had come overland: an open harbour filled with many
kinds of vessels from all over the Indian Ocean, a beach dotted with
shops and warehouses and behind that a vast city. Flanking the harbour
were inlets where ships could shelter from rough seas, and the port of
Beypore famous for its shipyards building dhows for Arab captains,
mainly from the Oman port of Sur.
The Zamorin and da Gama: A Tectonic Shift
The arrival of the Portuguese, their sleek fast
ships with huge sails emblazoned with huge red crosses of the faith,
vessels unlike anything seen before in India caused excitement. Small
craft came out filled with sightseers, bringing their children
‘merrily to see the ships’. Although da Gama’s men were at their
furthest point from home, their spirits rose. The Portuguese were
taken aback by the opulence of Calicut and the king’s palace covered
an area of a mile square and was surrounded by brightly lacquered
walls.
Many powerful Arabs from as far away as Egypt were
settled in Calicut, but they took care to honour the religious beliefs
of their hosts and lived in harmony. It was plain to the Portuguese
that those Arab ship-owners and traders played a dominant role in this
rich Indian Ocean emporiurn. Their houses were vast and some owned as
may as fifty ships capable of making the passage across the Arabian
Sea to the Red Sea carrying cargoes and pilgrims for Mecca; the Arab
mariners had taken control of the ocean routes from India, to both
east and west, because Brahminical orders (issued to stem the brain
drain when large numbers of Indian mathematicians and thinkers
migrated to Baghdad the Silicon Valley of those days!) altered the
tenets of Hinduism which inhibited its followers from making long sea
journeys to foreign lands with the punishment of ostracism and ‘loss
of caste’ for doing so. This was a major reason as to why Indians
became insular looking inwards and strategically only northwards at
the Himalayas wrongly perceived to be the subcontinent's natural
frontier.
Although da Gama had always refused, since leaving
Lisbon, to go ashore to meet the local rulers on the Swahili coast, he
knew that he could not maintain such a stance in the important ‘free
entrepot’ of Calicut. Now da Gama had to get ready for meeting the man
he knew to be the most powerful ruler on the Indian coast, addressed
as the ‘Rajah of Calicut’ in the letter he bore from his Portuguese
King Manuel. He had time to prepare himself, because his emissary had
returned to tell him that the rajah, the Zamorin, the Samudri
or Sea King, was away on a journey. 9
A display of respect to the Zamorin was vital. It was not going to be
easy for him to present himself with dignity in his three small
weather-beaten ships. He must also have realised by now that the gifts
reserved for the rajah would seem meagre and tawdry when unpacked from
their watertight boxes. But he was sustained by a dual faith, in his
God and his guns.
On receiving a message that the Zamorin was back
and awaiting him, da Gama put on a scarlet cloak reaching to the
ground, a blue satin tunic, white buskins and a blue velvet cap
adorned with a feather. As a guarantee of his safety, a group of
Zamorin’s warriors, the Nairs, was sent out to the Portuguese ships to
be held hostage for his safe return. 10
As da Gama took his first steps on to Indian soil,
with his escort around him, a palanquin was waiting and crowds lined
the roads to see the procession pass. When the palace gates were
reached, the Zamorin watched from a balcony as da Gama was helped down
from his palanquin by a page in red satin. The Portuguese admiral
walked slowly forward, his escort leading the way. A turning point in
the history of the Indian Ocean is crystallized in this scene.
Patterns of life and commerce, which had held good for many centuries,
were about to be shattered. A tectonic geopolitical shift from the
Indian Ocean peoples to the Europeans was about to occur.
Da Gama was led with elaborate ritual through a
series of anterooms with massive golden doors, until he came to the
royal chamber. The Zamorin, Mana Vikrama, lay on a green couch below a
silken canopy. On his left arm, above the elbow, glittered a bracelet
from which hung an immense diamond, and round his neck were strings of
pearls. He also wore a heartshaped emerald surrounded by rubbies, the
‘pathakkam’, insignia of the Malabar royalty. A meeting of cataclysmic
proportions was taking place with the ground shifting below the
Zamorin’s feet. 11
The mighty Zamorin, also known as
‘Kunnaikkonathiri’, 12 was
extremely offended at the poor standard of gifts from Europe that were
handed over to him. The Portuguese were then led away to captivity and
held for several days in a house surrounded by armed guards where the
conditions were hot and uncomfortable.
The leading Arab traders in Calicut were soon to be
revealed as being behind this turn of events, for news had already
reached them from East Africa about the cruel and inhuman behaviour of
the Portuguese. They had also heard of the wars waged by the
Portuguese in Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula against the Moors for
almost a century. Even though these Christian newcomers were too few
in number to start a fight at the moment, but now that they had
finally found the sea route to India they would surely come back in
greater force. Some of the captors may have wanted to kill the leader
of the 'Christian Franks', 13
while he was in their grasp; but that was no solution. The three ocean
going fast ships lying off Calicut were far superior to Zamorin's
admiral Kunjali Marrikar's coastal policing ships and would certainly
easily escape to sail home to tell the tale and bitter revenge would
be certain.
If the entire Portuguese expedition could have been
wiped out at this moment, leaving its fate a mystery, the Indian Ocean
people might have been granted a short reprieve. However, the Zamorin
would have vetoed any attempt to annihilate his uninvited guests
because such a deed would have flouted those very principles, which
had brought Calicut to prosperity: free trade and respect for law and
foreign shipping. There was also a practical restraint: the Portuguese
ships’ cannons pointing shore wards were of greater range versus
Calicut’s coastal artillery. The three ships would have to be boarded
and their crews overcome in hand-to-hand fighting, for Calicut had no
long range cannons of its own: the recipe for gunpowder was well known
but used mainly for personal weapons and fireworks. 14
This was a vivid example of non-appreciation by Indian kings of the
importance of technology in warfare.
The Portuguese would certainly be back, da Gama
said as he left, to punish Calicut for the humiliation meted out to
him. The time would come when the Zamorin would ‘repent still more’. 15
Foreboding seized the Zamorin. The Portuguese did return as promised
followed by the Dutch, the French and the British battling for
colonies and for domination of the Indian Ocean. 500 years of
insularity, stagnation and decay that followed da Gama’s arrival as is
often said is history.
Historical Exorcism: The Boxing Day Tsunami 2004
and The Navy
The Boxing Day Tsunami of 26 December 2004, a rare
phenomenon for the Indian Ocean, was undoubtedly a modern day
international tragedy of biblical proportions. An underwater
earthquake caused by the shifting Australasian geological tectonic
plates with its epicentre off the western coast of the northern
Sumatran province of Aceh at 8:24 am caused huge tidal waves, the
tsunami, leading to unprecedented loss of lives and extensive damage
to infrastructure in the coastal regions of Sumatra, Indonesia, off
the beaches of western Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar (A&N)
islands, particularly in the Nicobars, the eastern and southern coasts
of Sri Lanka, the Maldives and the coasts of the states of Tamilnadu
and Kerala. This occurrence required an, immediate humanitarian
response and disaster relief on a gigantic scale.
The Indian Navy took up the challenge posed by the
ravages of the tsunami and converted a demoralising numbing tragedy
into an unprecedented morale boosting opportunity to unwittingly
display and test its ‘rapid reaction’ capabilities by deploying its
forces to render succor to the affected populations not only
domestically in Tamil Nadu and the A&N islands but also
internationally in Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Aceh. This was indeed a
unique reaction to a unique situation never executed by the Navy
previously in its history.
Overcoming its traditional bureaucratic lethargy,
the Government, the Ministry of Defence and the Navy displayed an
exceptional and uncanny zeal for quick, high-speed decision-making to
facilitate timely and effective deployments to mitigate the untold
suffering. This was the Navy's fastest mobilization of its resources
in peacetime. By the same evening as the tsunami, as the first naval
aircraft with medical teams and supplies was landing in Colombo, four
simultaneous relief operations were commenced, Operations Rainbow,
Castor, Gambhir, and Madad under the overarching Operation
Sea Waves, and 19 ships, 4 aircraft and 14 helicopters were
dispatched to the affected regions of the Indian Ocean from their
bases in Mumbai, Cochin, and Visakhapatnam. Subsequently, three survey
ships were converted into 46 bedded hospital ships and sailed. 16
The Indian Navy had launched its biggest
humanitarian relief effort ever in the Indian Ocean including in
international waters. By the time these operations were terminated, 38
ships, 21 helicopters, 8 aircraft and about 5,500 personnel had been
pressed into service and a total of 654 ship days of deployments had
been completed. 17 A
monumental effort by any standards whose key feature was the rapid
provision of essential succor to the affected regions with appropriate
first aid to the injured, food, water and shelters to the traumatized
survivors and clearance of rubble to facilitate setting up of relief
camps and the movement of relief material.
Accolades and Capabilities
The Navy earned laurels with well-deserved
laudatory reports and praise in both the international press and the
national media for its swift decision-making and rapid and timely
deployments of its assets to not only aid its own affected nationals
but also for sparing a large proportion of its capacity for the
international disaster relief missions. For example by the time the
omnipresent US Navy arrived in southern Sri Lanka the Indian relief
teams had already landed and were fully deployed in total control of
the situation. Appreciating that there was very little they could
contribute, the US Naval helicopter carrier Bonhomme Richard steaming
toward Sri Lanka to support the US teams was ordered to change course
for Indonesia. 18
Taking note of India's prompt action in its
neighbourhood, India was invited to be a member of the 'core group'
constituting the US, Japan and Australia to further coordinate the
relief effort. With this it became quite clear that India had arrived
as a regional power, albeit a compassionate one. 19
"That's an important thing for India.. .to be involved as sort of an
equal partner in that group," said writer Mira Kamdar, an expert in
Indo-US relations and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in
New York. "They have real capabilities there. Its not like they (First
World nations) are doing some sort of favour by letting India into
this club."20
The first capability the tsunami tested was the
capacity of the Navy brass to react rapidly to a totally unexpected
and rapidly deteriorating situation. This required immediate decisions
with actions at the operational level. The need of the hour was to cut
through military and governmental inertia and red tape on a long
weekend (26 December 2004 was a Sunday!) to obtain permission and
necessary financial approvals to not only attend to pressing national
tasks but also divert a proportion of the naval effort with
appropriate relief materials to devastated locations overseas.
With the 'go ahead' decision taken and approvals
obtained, the next step in the decision making-action C2 loop was to
activate the operational structures of the Navy. Orders to the naval
commands were issued to bring the ships, aircraft and personnel to
'immediate notice' for deployment and to muster in the shortest
possible time relief materials, medical and reconstruction teams and
supplies. With preparations completed, the naval task groups proceeded
on their relief missions the same evening to four destinations, just
as the first relief aircraft was landing at Colombo. This test
authenticated that the Navy did indeed have a latent capability,
hitherto suspected even by naval planners, for 'rapid reaction' but
never before tasked on such short notice operations.
In addition, the majority of naval forces were not
only deployed as far away as Aceh from their bases and also sustained
over a long period whilst they rendered yeoman service and assistance.
With long 'sea legs' and 'staying power', this demonstrated the Navy's
'blue water' capability and of its capacity for distant operations.
Also extensive co-operation and coordination with the other two
services, the army and the air force, facilitated 'joint operations'
overseas by deployment of combined relief teams under very trying and
challenging conditions.
Finally the Navy cooperated extensively with
foreign and other regional navies to provide effective assistance in
the most efficient manner thus setting the standards for benchmarking
interoperability for future cooperation and identifying measures to
formulate common 'standard operating procedures' to further maximize
effectiveness.
The post mortem of the operations highlighted the
necessity for the Navy to suitably augment its nascent 'rapid
reaction' blue water capability with specialist ships, aviation and
other assets including infantry and having the staying power to
respond to unexpected fast developing situations in the future across
the complete spectrum of peace and war in far away locations in the
Indian Ocean.
Exorcism of Vasco da Gama's Ghost
India had declined to accept any foreign relief
assistance at home when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stated, "Several
countries had offered assistance, but...we have enough resources and
would be happy to receive assistance when needed." New Delhi's message
to the international community undoubtedly enhanced its posture as a
self-reliant nation without an 'aid seeking mentality'. 21
India's position on aid "is a signal of its notion of itself as a
player rather than a victim," Mira Kamdar said. "India has ambitions
to play this kind of role, and it is in fact starting to play this
role. It's not just a fantasy. India's response to the disaster was a
significant test for a country that wants a permanent seat on the UN
Security Council, and more generally in world affairs, one at the
grown ups' table".22
Suddenly politicians and national policymakers
stood up and took notice of the prospective capabilities of the Navy,
identifying diplomatic and operational tasks that it could achieve in
its traditional 'silent' manner, in far away lands over large oceanic
distances and all this without cumbersome permissions and support from
obdurate governments.
"This is a huge shift," C Raja Mohan, a professor
at JNU said in a telephone interview, "What you're seeing is the
Indian ability to constitute collective regional security
arrangements. The attitude has shifted from being a lone ranger
to...engagement with all the major powers." 23
When the potential of the navy and its
capabilities of achieving national goals and objectives through the
medium of the seas were realized, Indian strategic thought mired
through history in the status quo altered direction overnight. The
tsunami reversed India's strategic direction, focused over millennia
northwards towards the perceived natural boundary, the Himalayas, to
look for the first time southwards towards the oceanic frontiers.
India had suddenly transformed itself from an
inward looking insular nation to an outward maritime one. The ghost of
Vasco da Gama had, at last, been exorcised five hundred years after
the Portuguese admiral had landed at the thriving medieval trading
port of Calicut on the Malabar coast: precursor to the European
domination of the Indian sub continent and its ocean, which had now
become completely liberated. India could now seek its place in the
sun.
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Rear Admiral R Chopra, VSM is a former
Assistant Chief of Integrated Defence Staff (Joint Operations). |
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