Operation X, 1971: how India's frogmen attacked East Pakistan

The heart of Operation X was a training problem: how to turn angry, untrained refugees into underwater saboteurs in a matter of weeks. The raw material was Bengali volunteers — students, fishermen and boatmen who had fled East Pakistan — plus East-Pakistani defectors from the Pakistan Navy. The most valuable of these were eight Bengali submariners who had deserted their crew at Toulon in France; already skilled divers, they became the core instructors. At the hidden C2P camp on the Bhagirathi at Plassey, recruits were drilled to swim long distances in darkness, control their breathing and fear, and work in silent teams. The signature weapon was the limpet mine — a magnetic charge a swimmer clamps to a ship's steel hull below the waterline, then swims clear before a timer fires it. The technique demanded nerve above all: a night approach through current, hands working blind against a hull while a sentry paced the deck above, and a getaway with no cover but the black water. Because the whole enterprise had to stay deniable, the men often carried no papers and no proof of who had sent them. Weeks of this turned civilians into a force that could strike four ports in a single night.

Commander M.N.R. Samant — the Indian Navy officer who commanded the C2P camp and ran Operation X on the ground; he won the Maha Vir Chakra and, decades later, co-wrote the book that finally told the story. Lieutenant Commander G. Martis — the training coordinator at Plassey who drilled raw volunteers into combat swimmers. The eight Toulon submariners — Bengali crewmen who deserted the Pakistan Navy's submarine programme in France and became the skilled core of the instructors, since they already knew diving and the sea. The Directorate of Naval Intelligence and R&AW — India's naval and external intelligence services, who conceived, funded and hid the whole enterprise. The Bengali volunteers — nearly 500 trained, many of them students, fishermen and boatmen from East Pakistan, who carried the mines and took the risks. Colonel M.A.G. Osmani — the Mukti Bahini commander-in-chief, into whose wider liberation force these frogmen fed. The Pakistan Army and Navy at the ports — the target: garrisons at Chittagong, Mongla, Narayanganj and Chandpur, who woke on 16 August to burning ships and could not work out how it had been done.

Operation Jackpot reduces to a set of hard figures, some firmer than others. The covert unit Naval Commando Operations (X) was raised in April 1971, and its C2P training camp opened at Plassey on the Bhagirathi in May. Nearly 500 Bengali volunteers were trained there, stiffened by eight submariners who had deserted the Pakistan Navy at Toulon. On the night of 15–16 August 1971, about 160 frogmen struck four ports simultaneously — Chittagong, Mongla, Narayanganj and Chandpur — sinking or crippling tens of thousands of tons of shipping in barely an hour. The signal to attack was not an order but two songs on All India Radio: a children's song to stand by, and a Tagore song to strike. Over the four-month campaign, running until Bangladesh's liberation on 16 December 1971, the commandos are credited with sinking or damaging more than 100 vessels and choking East Pakistan's river supply lines. The human toll among them: eight killed, thirty-four wounded and fifteen captured. The precise tonnage remains debated, but the strategic damage is not in doubt.

Strip away the tonnage figures and Operation Jackpot was young men swimming alone in black water toward armed ships. Many were teenagers and students only months earlier; now they floated downriver holding a mine, knowing that a sentry's torch or a slip of the hand could kill them. The physical ordeal was brutal — hours in cold water, fighting current and exhaustion, then the cold arithmetic of fixing a charge to a hull and swimming clear before it blew. Some drowned. Some were caught: over the campaign eight commandos were killed, thirty-four wounded and fifteen captured, and to be taken by the Pakistan Army in 1971 often meant torture and death. For the volunteers this was not a foreign war but their own — many had fled the very massacres they were now avenging, with families still trapped inside East Pakistan. There was a cost on the other side too. Sailors and crew aboard the mined ships died in explosions they never saw coming, and the sinkings deepened the shortages and fear gripping a province already torn apart. The frogmen's courage was real and often astonishing. So was the human price — paid in drowned teenagers, tortured prisoners, and the anonymous dead aboard ships that simply blew apart in the night.

Operation Jackpot matters because it shows how a war can be won below the waterline, by men most histories forgot. There were no tanks and no famous generals here — just volunteers with mines, a hidden camp on the Bhagirathi, and two songs on the radio. Yet by choking the rivers that fed the Pakistan Army, they did strategic damage out of all proportion to their numbers and their cost. The deeper lesson is about who makes history. These frogmen were students, boatmen and fishermen, not professional soldiers; the brain behind them was a covert unit whose very existence was denied. For decades their story stayed buried — under secrecy on one side, under national myth on the other — and it took a book in 2019 to give the Indian half its due. Remembering it honestly means holding several truths at once: that this was a genuine feat of courage; that it was a joint Indian–Bangladeshi effort, not a solo one; and that its human cost was paid mostly by very young men. Jackpot reminds us that the decisive act in a war is not always the loudest one — sometimes it is a swimmer in the dark, fixing a charge to a hull, trusting that a song on the radio meant it was finally time.