Submerged pride

As of now it will only be around lunch time on Saturday — a full week after the tragedy occurred — that the British mini-sub, LR5, hopes to make contact with the besieged submarine. The high levels of secrecy that were maintained initially, which brought back memories of the notorious “Iron Curtain” of yore, were obviously dictated by notions of national interest — highly misplaced notions of national interest, as it turns out. Today, the Russian political and bureaucratic elites stand exposed not just for the shabby manner in which they run the country’s defence institutions, but for their callous disregard for the lives of citizens. As the head of the Committee of Mothers of Russian Soldiers in Chechnya, put it, “The Kursk drama shows once again that human life has no value in the eyes of our military, and even less so in the eyes of our politicians.” She and many of her fellow citizens believe that the crew was deliberately sacrificed on the altar of misplaced pride and arrogance.

For Putin, with his ambitions of steering Russia to international pre-eminence in a post-Cold War world, this could not have come at a more inopportune moment. Indeed, the Kursk, which was designed to hit aircraft carriers with cruise missiles and then torpedo them, was to have escorted a Russian flotilla to the Mediterranean later this year, in a show of the country’s naval might. The fate that visited this submarine should also come as a cautionary lesson to other nations. The US, if it does suffer from feelings of complacency over the discomfiture of the Russians, would do well to recall the `Thresher’, its submarine that sank in the North Atlantic in April 1963, taking with it all 129 on board. As for the Indian naval establishment, the tragedy must bring home the dangers lurking in its own waters. Reports have it that 14 of India’s 18 submarines in service don’t come equipped with rescue facilities and that the Navy’s skills in this area are primitive in the extreme.