Some of the sailors rushed to the deck and saw the warship entangled with a giant merchant vessel. With the vessel charging in the opposite direction, INS Prahar was ploughed backwards for nearly 2 km and began tilting to one side. Some of its crew leapt onboard the Shipping Corporation of India's (SCI) container-laden MV Rajiv Gandhi, which it had collided with, and stopped the ship. An hour after the collision, the "abandon ship" alarm was sounded and the 73-man crew jumped safely overboard as the 450-tonne warship began taking in water through a gash in its hull and sank into the Arabian Sea.

It was the second instance of a warship colliding with a merchantman in four months (see box). Fortunately, the merchant ship did not topple the warship over. "There would have been casualties had it done so,'' a senior naval official said. The loss of the warship is a triple blow to the navy-to its prestige, to the seamanship of its sailors and to its shrinking surface fleet.

Sinking Feeling There has been a series of mishaps involving naval warships in the past few years

April 21, 2006 INS Prahar lost at sea after collision with a container ship. Three inquiries ordered. February 22, '06 Five sailors die in a fire on board INS Magar off Vizag while disposing of ordnance. December 2005 INS Trishul's captain admits his fault after it collides with a merchant ship. March 2004 Corvette INS Agray written off after anti-submarine rocket explodes near it. November 1999 Fleet tanker INS Jyoti collides with a merchant vessel in the Bay of Bengal. August 1990 INS Andaman sinks in the Bay of Bengal with 15 crewmen after developing a leak. INS Prahar and MV Rajiv Gandhi collided around 9.30 p.m. on April 21

"INS Prahar was approaching our ship from the right and as per the rules governing ships at sea, it was supposed to get out of the way, which it clearly did not," said a senior SCI official. A senior naval official counters this by saying, "Just because you have right of way does not mean you ram another ship-will a motorist run a pedestrian over because he was crossing his path? The merchant ship should have taken action to avert a mishap.''

However, Rule 7 of the International Regulations for Avoiding Collisions at Sea makes it incumbent for all ships to use radar and long-range scanning to obtain early warnings of the risk of collision. Both ships had at least two radars each and it is still not clear why they failed to warn them of each other's approach.

Capable of speeds of over 40 knots, INS Prahar was the navy's fastest warship. It had been deployed to intercept enemy targets and attack installations. In 1999, it had intercepted merchant vessel MV Alondra Rainbow, which had been taken over by pirates, in the Arabian Sea after slower coast-guard vessels had failed to do so.

How this highly manoeuvrable warship got entangled with a lumbering merchantman will be one of the questions to be probed by three separate inquiries instituted-by the SCI, by the navy and by the director-general of shipping. The naval inquiries are likely to be hampered by the fact that the warship went down with all its log books, which had detailed records of its movement. It will now have to rely almost entirely on survivor accounts.

The navy will try to recover the vessel with the help of commerical experts, maybe even from abroad. Salvaging its reputation in the wake of a spate of recent mishaps will be a far more onerous task.

-By Sandeep Unnithan

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