A letter re: Vice Admiral Choudhary

[Awaisi]

Sallam,

There are some interesting issues brought to light in this letter, such as the tussle between V. Admiral Choudari and Ayub Khan and also Quaid Azam's vision about Pakistan Navy.



http://www.dawn.com/2004/03/09/letted.htm

Vice-Admiral Choudri

This has reference to Mr M. H. Askari's article on Vice-Admiral Choudri (February 29).

I would like to correct two points in that article. First, the admiral did not specialize in gunnery. He was a torpedo and anti-submarine specialist. Second, the first Indian to be commissioned in the Royal Indian Navy was not a Parsi. He was Sub-Lieutenant D. N. Mukerji, an engineer from Bihar. He rose to the rank of captain and took premature retirement from service in 1950.

Admiral Choudri had to resign because he opposed General Ayub Khan's attempts to hinder the expansion of the navy. Even the Quaid-i-Azam had visualized a strong navy for Pakistan.

Very few people know that when the subcontinent was being partitioned, Mr Jinnah made serious attempts to acquire the islands of Andaman and Nicobar in the Bay of Bengal as part of Pakistan.

So astute was his vision that even before partition, he realized the importance of a navy and these islands as a link between the two wings of Pakistan. Unfortunately, General Ayub did not understand either the maritime compulsions of Pakistan or the importance of a navy. He was sea-blind.

There was a longstanding background of differences between Vice-Admiral Choudri and General Ayub Khan, dating back to the time when as head of the navy, then the senior service, the latter insisted upon being regarded as senior in protocol among the three services chiefs.

The general tried, as army commander, to become supreme commander of the armed forces. His plans were thwarted by the admiral. The general was persistently opposed to the navy's plan for acquisition of a cruiser and, at meetings and otherwise, expressed himself strongly in favour of maximum resources being directed to the development of the army and the air force, with the navy's plan being relegated to a lower priority.

The two could not sail in the same boat. While the admiral was a professional sailor devoted exclusively to the fledgling navy, the general was a scheming manipulator for whom power became an end in itself. The admiral resigned in disgust.

KHALID WASAY

[Usman Shabbir]

HMS Choudri: crusader for peace

By M. H. Askari

Vice-Admiral Haji Muhammad Siddiqi Choudri, who passed away on Friday, had the distinction of being not only the first Pakistani to command the Pakistan Navy, but also in fact the first Indian to be commissioned (in 1932) into the executive branch of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN). As far as one can recall, before him only one other Indian (a Parsi officer) had the honour of being granted a commission (engineering branch) in the Naval service, the officer cadre of the executive branch of the RIN until then reserved for British officers or personnel seconded from the Royal Navy for service in India.

Choudri Sahib, as the younger naval officers generally called him, had most of his early training in England and specialized in the gunnery branch. He held various appointments both at sea and with land-based naval formations before and after the Second World War. At the Japanese surrender ceremony in Japan at the end of the war he was given command of the two-ship formation that represented the Royal Indian Navy. At the time of partition, Choudri Sahib happened to be the senior-most Indian officer and was involved in the division of the RIN's assets between India and Pakistan.

After independence, his early years with the Pakistan Navy were spent in service abroad or at sea and it was only in the 50s that he was assigned command of the Royal Pakistan Navy. The navy at the time was extremely short of ships and training facilities and Admiral Choudri had to start building the country's navy from scratch.

It was by no means an easy task, not only because he did not receive the most willing cooperation from the British officers who were still serving in the Pakistan Navy in a fairly large number. A bigger hurdle was the paucity of funds as the army was given the major share of money and an exceptionally large share went into the building and expansion of the young air force.

It is unbelievable how slow the authorities at the top were in comprehending the value of the navy to a country which had a preponderant coastline and also had to cope with the unusual geo-political situation of its two halves being divided by more than a thousand miles and the only link between the two halves being the sea.

Generals Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan who had the dominant voice in working out a policy for the country's defence and in the allocation of resource were obsessed with the odd concept of the defence of the eastern wing lying with the west. The blatant disadvantage consequently suffered by East Pakistan became too obvious during the 1965 war when East Pakistan was left to fend for itself.

Admiral Choudri was only too well aware of the difficulty of defending the eastern wing in the event of hostilities between India and Pakistan and from the outset laid great stress on the critical importance of providing East Pakistan with virtually a self-supporting naval setup by building a modern naval base in Chittagong.

But he received little support from his colleagues in the army whenever the matter was taken up at the higher level of the administrative echelons. As a result, Admiral Choudri was unable to see his plans becoming a reality on the ground, leaving the people of East Pakistan with a perpetual feeling of being left out in the cold where the nation's defence was concerned.

Not unexpectedly, the demand for an adequate naval base for East Pakistan featured in all of the negotiations for their political rights by the leaders of the eastern wing.

Before the showdown in 1970-71 the shifting of the naval headquarters to East Pakistan prominently featured in Shaikh Mujib's 'six points' but by then it was obviously too late to do anything about it.

Admiral Choudri's differences with the people who mattered in drawing up the future defence policy of Pakistan came to a critical point with Gen Ayub Khan's rise to power; he had scant regard for the admiral's capabilities or for his insistence on the strengthening of East Pakistan's capacity for its own defence. Their acute differences on policy matters and clash of personalities led to Admiral Choudri offering to relinquish the command of the navy, an offer which Ayub Khan received with an obvious sense of relief.

However, even after his departure from the navy, Admiral Choudri continued to promote the cause of making the people aware of the critical importance of Pakistan's maritime defence. He set up the Pakistan institute of maritime research and strategy in Karachi and held many seminars to promote its objectives. Indeed, my last meeting with him was at a presentation that he had sponsored on the question of confidence-building measures between the navies of Pakistan and India for defusing tensions between the two countries in the interest of a peaceful maritime environment in the region.

The main feature of the seminar was an excellent presentation by retired Rear Admiral Hasan Ansari on the basis of research he had conducted jointly with a retired Indian naval officer, Rear Admiral Vohra, with regard to the specific irritants in the way of resolving disputes in the area of maritime defence. At least one of the outstanding bilateral issues identified in the research, the nagging dispute over Sir Creek, is slated for resolution by the governments of the two countries when their top-level negotiations take place.

Despite his age (92) and extremely poor health, Admiral Choudri sat through most of the discussion. Towards the end when he looked alarmingly unwell, his son, Rishad, pushed his wheelchair out of the hall - but quietly, without interfering with the proceedings. Choudri Sahib was a crusader for harmony and the importance of moral values to international peace up to the end.

http://www.dawn.com/2004/02/29/fea.htm#2

[Noman]

Sallam,

There are some interesting issues brought to light in this letter, such as the tussle between V. Admiral Choudari and Ayub Khan and also Quaid Azam's vision about Pakistan Navy.
.
.
.

KHALID WASAY

Funnily (or sadly) enough, the real heart wrenching issue in this letter is the fact that the Quaid asked for AND got the British Viceroy Mountbatten. to agree to hand over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Pakistan as part of Bengal during the partition. But after his death, no one bothered to follow up on this and they went to India by default.

Today the whole strategic balance of the Indian Ocean would have been different it these has been in Pakistani hands, since most probably they would have survived the breakup of Pakistan and would still be in our hands.

When I first (about eight years back) found out about this blunder I could have cried!