How Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla went down with INS Khukri in 1971

Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla (1926–1971) — born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, a career naval officer and the commanding officer of INS Khukri. In the ship's final minutes he organised the evacuation, is remembered for giving away his own life jacket, and chose to stay aboard rather than abandon his crew. The crew of INS Khukri — around eighteen officers and close to two hundred sailors, most of whom died with the ship; the survivors, picked up later, carried the account of what happened on deck. INS Kirpan — Khukri's sister frigate, sailing with her that night; she came under attack too but survived and helped raise the alarm. PNS Hangor — the Pakistani Daphné-class submarine, commanded by Commander Ahmad Tasnim, whose crew located and sank Khukri and then evaded a long Indian counter-hunt. The Indian Navy's Western command — which had sent the frigates to hunt a submarine off Gujarat as part of the wider 1971 sea campaign. These were the people on both sides of a few minutes of combat that became one of the most remembered episodes in modern Indian naval history — a hard defeat wrapped around an act of extraordinary personal duty.

The bare figures around INS Khukri are stark. She was a Blackwood-class anti-submarine frigate, pennant number F149, commissioned in 1958 and built to hunt submarines. On the night of 9 December 1971 the Pakistani submarine PNS Hangor struck her with homing torpedoes about forty nautical miles off Diu, and she went under in roughly two minutes. Of the men aboard, close to two hundred died — most sources count around 18 officers and about 176 sailors, though survivor lists and records differ slightly. Only a small number were pulled alive from the sea, first by INS Kirpan and then by later search ships. Khukri became the only Indian warship lost in combat since Independence in 1947, and the first warship anywhere sunk by a submarine since the Second World War ended in 1945. Her captain, Mahendra Nath Mulla, was posthumously awarded the Maha Vir Chakra, India's second-highest wartime gallantry decoration — the only naval officer honoured with it in the entire 1971 war. These small, specific numbers fix the scale of a loss that unfolded faster than most of the crew could even reach the deck.

Behind the numbers were homes across India waiting for men who did not come back. Close to two hundred families — sailors and officers, many of them young — received the news that Khukri had gone down in the dark off Diu with almost everyone aboard. For the survivors pulled from the water hours later, the memory of that night, of shipmates they could not reach, stayed for life. Many of them spoke afterwards about the captain: how Mulla moved among them in the final minutes, pushing men towards the rafts, and how he gave up his own life jacket. Those first-hand accounts are the reason we know the story from the inside, not just from an official signal. Widows and children grew up around an absence that a medal could honour but never fill. Over time the Diu memorial became a place where these families and their descendants could stand at the edge of the sea and be recognised. The human weight of Khukri is not really in the statistics of the war; it is in the ordinary households that lost a father, a son or a husband in a few minutes on one December night — and in the shipmates who carried their memory home.

In December 1971 the sinking of Khukri was, first of all, a shock and a grief. India was winning the war at sea; Karachi had been hit, Pakistan's navy was mostly bottled up, and then came the news that a frigate had gone down with almost her whole crew. It was a painful reminder that even a winning side pays in lives, and that the submarine threat was real. Over the decades the meaning has shifted from raw loss towards remembrance and honour. Captain Mulla's Maha Vir Chakra placed his choice at the centre of the story. A memorial to INS Khukri stands on a hill at Diu, overlooking the sea where she sank, with a model of the ship inside a glass case; families and veterans gather there. A later frigate was named INS Khukri to carry the name forward, and the ship and her captain feature in naval tradition, books and school retellings. The event is now taught less as a defeat than as an example of leadership and sacrifice. The facts have not changed — a ship lost, hundreds dead — but the frame around them has moved from wartime bulletin to national memory.

Khukri matters because it holds two truths at once, and refuses to let go of either. The first is a hard military lesson: even in a war you are winning, the sea can turn in minutes, and a single modern submarine can undo a frigate that never saw it coming. That is why the sinking pushed the Indian Navy to take submarine detection, sonar and anti-submarine tactics far more seriously in the years that followed — a costly lesson bought with real lives. The second truth is about what leadership looks like when everything has gone wrong. Mulla could have saved himself; instead he spent his last minutes on his crew and stayed with his ship. That choice is why his name endures, and why the old naval tradition of the captain being last to leave stopped being an abstraction and became a face. The larger legacy is not a myth of invincibility but something more honest and more useful: a reminder that courage is often quiet and final, that we should count the human cost even of victories, and that the way a country remembers such men — through a hillside memorial at Diu and a medal — shapes what it asks of the next generation who go to sea.