Admiral Jayant Nadkarni
Chief of the Indian Naval Staff who introduced his country’s first nuclear-powered submarine
ADMIRAL JAYANT NADKARNI, who has died aged 86, was the 12th Indian to hold the appointment of Chief of Naval Staff of the Indian Navy and the last to have been trained in Britain.
Jayant Ganpat Nadkarni was born on December 5 1931 into a Maharashtrian family and educated in Bombay. In 1946, aged 15, he joined the Merchant Marine Training Ship Dufferin under Captain Sir Henry Digby-beste, who did much to promote Indians within the Royal Indian Marine and its successor, the Royal Indian Navy. Nadkarni completed the course with distinction in December 1948 and was recruited into the rapidly expanding Royal Indian Navy, which wanted Dufferin-trained boys like him.
From 1949 to 1953, after four months at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, where he came top in many classes, Nadkarni served in the cadet training ship Devonshire and as a midshipman in Royal Navy warships. After service in India in the British-built destroyer Ganga, he returned to Britain in 1955 to specialise in navigation, an art in which he excelled.
A graduate of the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington, in Tamil Nadu and of the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1971 and 1972 Nadkarni held several important operational, training and staff appointments, including command of the British-built Type 12 frigate INS Talwar (1968-69), as chief naval instructor at the National Defence College in New Delhi (1973-74) and for two years from 1975 as captain of the cruiser Delhi (formerly Achilles).
In 1979 he was promoted to rear admiral, and in his 14 months as Flag Officer, Western Fleet, the fleet visited Jeddah and incorporated the Soviet-built Kashin-class destroyers, INS Rajput and Rana, into the Indian order of battle. He was chief of personnel at naval headquarters (1982-84), then Flag Officer, Eastern Naval Command, based at Visakhapatnam.
Next, Nadkarni became the Vice Chief of Naval Staff under Admiral Radhakrishna Hariram Tahiliani. Earlier, when both were captains, Nadkarni had been defence counsel for Tahiliani at the latter’s court-martial, and acquittal, for grounding the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant off Goa. Both men had been trained in Britain and the US and wanted to Americanise the Indian Navy, but it was expected that another senior vice-admiral would take over from Tahiliani.
Nadkarni’s retirement had been announced, and he was nominated to head Bombay’s Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), the largest container port in India. But when the financier Ram Narain Malhotra, who had been recalled from the World Bank to take over the Reserve Bank of India, wanted the JNPT appointment for his wife, Nadkarni was given an extension to become the Chief of Naval Staff (CNS) in 1987.
Controversy ensued when Nadkarni then appointed a Us-trained officer, in preference to the Soviet-trained Rear-admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, to command India’s Western Fleet. Bhagwat lodged a 412-page complaint against Nadkarni and a legal battle followed that led to Bhagwat becoming Chief of the Naval Staff in 1996, only to be dismissed two years later.
Meanwhile Nadkarni served a full three-year term as CNS, during which he oversaw the introduction into Indian service of the first nuclear-propelled submarine, INS Chakra, on lease from the USSR. He also directed the Indian Navy’s role in Operation Cactus, the thwarting of a coup in the Maldives.
Aware of his ancestors’ 18thcentury struggles at sea against the British and Dutch, Nadkarni consciously attempted to resurrect India’s maritime tradition, and, in 1977, was a founding member of India’s Maritime History Society. During his career he was awarded the Param Vishisht Seva medal, the Nausena medal and the Vishisht Seva medal for distinguished service.
Known as “Podgy”, Nadkarni had a quiet, self-effacing façade which hid a steely determination to do right by his ships and men. A keen photographer, once, while airborne in a helicopter, he gave steering orders to the fleet to put the sunlight in a favourable bearing for a picture.
In retirement he settled in Pune, where he founded the Centre for Advanced Strategic Studies, and from 1995 to 1998 he edited the magazine Maritime International.
When Nadkarni’s wife, Vimal Divekar, whom he had married in 1956, became partially sighted, he showed his love for her, and his own wide cultural knowledge, by guiding her around Europe. She predeceased him in 2016, and he is survived by two sons, one a rear-admiral and chief of staff in the Indian Southern Naval Command.