None in his right senses will contest the need for an aircraft carrier for India. Regrettably, however, the question “Why Gorshkov?” remains unanswered in ‘Naval gazing into the future’ by Kailash Kohli (IE, December 13). He has not even discussed the alternative of an indigenous carrier. A few misgivings from ‘skeptics’: can just the 45000-ton 21-year old Gorshkov transform a ‘coastal’ navy into a ‘trans-oceanic’ one? Have we taken steps to simultaneously gear up the other two services to this vision? The advocates of large-deck aircraft carriers claim that it is a ‘priceless tool of power of projection’ and Atal Bihari Vajpayee could have intended to convey just that when he addressed the Combined Commanders Conference and spoke about India’s “sphere of influence.” Comparison with the US Navy’s deployment of “six aircraft carrier groups in the Gulf and the Mediterranean” for strikes on targets in Iraq is therefore not strictly valid. As the Express reported (‘Ground this Admiral’, August 26, 2002), Admiral Gorshkov can be docked “at Kochi or in the east, But it’s meant to menace Pakistan”. The Navy cannot dock it in Mumbai port, a logical harbour if the Navy wanted it for air defence of the Western Fleet or of Western “offshore oil installations or our oil conduits in the shape of oil tankers which feed our refineries with oil from the Gulf” etc, all to the west. In the current volatile environment, conflicts will be short and swift. The game may be over by the time the mighty Admiral Gorshkov arrives on the scene. Apart from being ‘old’, the Russian Navy assigned Admiral Gorshkov to the Northern Fleet for only five years; it was inoperable after major machinery casualty in 1992, a major fire in 1993, and boiler explosion and fire on February 2 1994. It is odd that Indian naval engineers, architects, etc who have virtually examined “every nut and bolt” have certified Gorshkov after these major mishaps and after being inoperable for so long. Why, then, did the Russians want to shed Gorshkov by offering it “free’’ to India? More amazing is the fact that the government has sat over a proposal made by the Navy in the early 1990s for a French design for an indigenous aircraft carrier. Indian dockyards have the capability to build an aircraft carrier for limited strike capability. The right approach would be to build an aircraft carrier suitable to the needs of the Indian Navy and appropriate for operating under Indian conditions. As Admiral (Retd) J.G. Nadkarni aptly put it, “The whole thing will be the equivalent of taking over the 20-year Ambassador left by your aunt in her will and then spending a few lakhs on it to bring it up to the standard of an Opel Astra”!
