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The Print
12 minutes ago
- The Print
Legacy of Air Chief Marshal LM Katre, the man who flew Spitfires & ushered IAF into a modern era
He made these remarks while delivering the keynote address at the 16th Air Chief Marshal L.M. Katre Memorial Lecture, an event attended by senior IAF officials and representatives from the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). He also revealed that several F16 fighter aircraft undergoing maintenance at Pakistan's Jacobabad air base were damaged and that a Saab Erieye, an Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) system, aircraft was destroyed at the Bholari air base. New Delhi: IAF Chief Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh officially announced Saturday the Indian Air Force's S-400 Triumf air defence system shot down five Pakistani fighter aircraft and a large airborne surveillance platform from a distance of about 300 km during Operation Sindoor in early May. Instituted in memory of Air Chief Marshal Lakshman Madhav Katre, the IAF's 12th chief, the annual lecture pays tribute to a leader who combined front-line operational experience with a sustained push for modernisation, training reforms and stronger links with industry. ThePrint looks at the life and legacy of ACM Katre who became the second air force chief to die in harness. The other was Air Marshal Subroto Mukerjee, who died at the age of 49 in November 1960, caused by choking on food during an official visit to Tokyo. From leading a Spitfire squadron early in his career to overseeing the induction of Mirage 2000s, ACM Katre's service spanned multiple eras of air warfare and still continues to shape the IAF's journey, 40 years since his demise. In Royal Indian Air Force At 17, ACM Katre entered the Royal Indian Air Force as an officer cadet in 1944, receiving his commission a year later. His career spanned the closing years of the Second World War and the formative decades of independent India's air power. Katre's early flying years were shaped in the cockpit of piston-engine fighters, most notably the Supermarine Spitfire which he flew operationally in the late 1940s as the first generation of IAF's combat pilots adapted wartime experience to peacetime roles. With the service's rapid shift into the jet age, he commanded frontline squadrons including the No. 17 Squadron, famously known as the Golden Arrows, and No. 23 Squadron, called the Panthers, that successively operated the de Havilland Vampire, the IAF's first jet fighter, followed by the Hawker Hunter and later the Folland Gnat and MiG-21. These aircraft not only defined the IAF's strike and air defence capabilities through the 1950s and 1960s, but also became synonymous with the service's growing tactical sophistication, from high-speed interceptions to close-in dogfighting. From 1966 to 1968, Katre commanded an operational flying station. According to IAF's official records, his tenure is remembered for the speed with which he transformed the base from routine functioning to full combat readiness, a change attributed as much to his instinct for leadership as to his meticulous attention to men and machines. Among his innovations during this time were improvised aircraft 'hideouts', constructed with local materials, designed to conceal fighters from hostile eyes and protect them from air strikes. In subsequent simulated attack drills, the shelters proved so effective that the practice was swiftly copied across other frontline stations. Then, in October 1968, the region was struck by the kind of disaster that tested military skill in an entirely different way. Monsoon floods tore through North Bengal, Sikkim and Bhutan, cutting off villages and stranding thousands. Appointed the local commander of the Air Force's relief operations, Katre oversaw a complex ballet of airlifts and supply drops into some of the most inaccessible terrains in the eastern Himalayas. In Bhutan and in Assam's Goalpara district, his teams brought food, medicine and shelter to hundreds of refugees. Subsequently, in 1970, his dual achievements in sharpening operational readiness and leading critical humanitarian relief earned him the Ati Vishisht Seva Medal (AVSM). During the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, Katre served as the station commander of 18 Wing at Pathankot, a forward base of high strategic value in the western sector. Confronted with repeated Pakistani air raids, he maintained the base's operational capability by dispersing aircraft to minimise exposure, directing rapid runway repairs after each strike and ensuring close coordination with air-defence units to protect key assets. The IAF official records show that under his command, Pathankot's squadron, then flying Sukhoi Su-7 strike aircraft and MiG-21 interceptors, were able to sustain both offensive sorties and defensive patrols throughout the conflict, making a significant contribution to the air campaign in the western theatre. After the war, Katre turned his attention to training and institution-building. As Commandant of the Air Force Academy at Dundigal, he revamped the training modules completely to prioritise jet instruction, expanded facilities for ground-duty officers and introduced advanced flight simulators. These initiatives led to significant improvements in safety and training standards, which were later adopted throughout the Indian Air Force. Subsequently, Katre went on to serve as Senior Air Staff Officer at Western Air Command and Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of both Eastern and Western Air Commands. Then, in 1983, Katre was appointed the chairman of the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), where he worked to better align the IAF's operational requirements with HAL's production capabilities, a coordination seen as critical to the service's modernisation efforts during that period. Recognising that indigenous manufacturing was crucial for India's strategic autonomy and modernisation, Katre worked to enhance coordination between the IAF and HAL. Under his leadership, efforts were intensified to streamline aircraft production schedules, improve quality control and expedite the development and induction of new fighter jets and support equipment A year later, Katre took over as chief of the air staff. His tenure coincided with the induction of the Dassault Mirage 2000, a modern multi-role fighter that replaced old mechanical controls with electronic fly-by-wire systems, allowing more precise handling. It also carried advanced missiles capable of engaging targets beyond the pilot's visual range, marking a major leap in air combat technology for that time. The first aircraft arrived in June 1985 with squadrons such as No. 7 and No. 1 beginning their conversion—training pilots to switch from flying one type of aircraft to another—between 1985 and 1986, reflecting Katre's push to introduce advanced capabilities into the IAF. Less than a year into his tenure, on 1 July 1985, Katre died suddenly at the age of 58 from a heart attack, becoming the second IAF chief to die in office. (Edited by Ajeet Tiwari) Also Read: We were given free hand, no restrictions placed on us: IAF chief on Op Sindoor
News18
12 minutes ago
- News18
Army Chief Gen Upendra Dwivedi Ridicules Pakistan's Victory Claim Over Field Marshal Promotion
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Scroll.in
42 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
‘Flowers of the Sun': Historian Mariam Dossal goes far and wide across Kutch to understand it
Mariam Dossal's new book, Flowers of the Sun: The People and Land of Kutch c.1740–2020, is an ambitious project. It is not only a history, nor is it an attempt to account for a people. It is instead a gathering up, an assemblage and from the ways in which material is placed, a composite emerges that allows the reader to fill up some gaps in knowledge. For a former Professor of the Department of History, University of Mumbai, this is a passion project which takes in archives, sure, but also uses interviews and personal accounts to build a picture of an ignored area. I have to confess that I have very little knowledge of Kutch, and so perhaps I am the perfect reviewer or the worst kind. I have been to the Rann, where I learnt to my horror that the area did not rhyme with paan. My memory of it is heat and salt and a shopping trip in which my host smiled at me and said that the shopkeeper must have liked me. 'Why would you say that?' I asked. 'He offered you water. Most people get Thums Up.' Dammed and damned It is a dry land and the aridity, as Dossal explains, can be accounted for in three ways. The first is human intervention, where rivers are dammed and diverted and water stops flowing. (This may sound familiar but that is what we can do to each other, thus damning from on high those who are at the bottom of the pyramid and suffer the most.) The second is geographic, and the third is governmental indifference. Dossal shows how each successive Five-Year Plan simply cut down on what the earlier one had promised and when the Narmada was dammed (or damned), she quotes Lyla Mehta's study which says, 'Instead of allowing for the irrigation of 9.45 lakh acres of land in Kutch, only 95,000 acres of land were to get irrigation. In this way, less than 2 per cent of Kutch's area stands to benefit from the Kutch Branch Canal.' It seems as if governments did not think much of Kutch, not even when there was a terrible earthquake there on January 26, 2001, a 7.7 on the Richter scale. (Remember that each number up means a tenfold increase in wave amplitude; the energy released increases by approximately 32 times for each whole number increase, not 10 times.) When Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel of the BJP appeared on television, reporters asked about relief measures and Pravinchandra Shah remembers that he responded: 'Again and again you are asking me about Kutch. Should I be concerned about Kutch or about the situation here at Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar?' (Before you ask, 'Pravinchandra Shah, who?' he is one of the unlikely heroes of the story and we would really have liked to know more about him. He was introduced to Dossal and she interviewed him, only to discover that he had been a journalist and had masses of material on the area, going back decades, which he and his wife Irene had preserved intact. Much of the material in the book, Dossal says, came from Pravinchandra Shah's squirrelling away of material that pertained to the area. When I read about this man from Takka Panvel, I was put in mind of Adil Jussawalla's archives, the papers he put his faith in, the cuttings he made, not of his own work, but of other writers' work too. It is a wonderful collection and it is to be hoped that it is being preserved well in the library to which it has been consigned. Take a look at the picture of the Kutch Samachar of April 2, 1894, with the magnificent headline 'Kutch, An El Dorado of Incapables.') You do not have to look far for the reasons behind such political indifference. Kutch is underpopulated and the fewer the votes, the less the interest. Kutch was often subsumed into Kathiawar, so that when Gandhiji visited, his Kathiawari hosts did not invite anyone from Kutch. The Mahatma was not impressed, for he saw the casteism of the area at close hand. He never came back. Political life of Kutch Dossal has origins in Kutch but she is even-handed. She points to this casteism and also talks about the role that it had in the horrors of the slave trade. Kutch was once a thriving centre of maritime trade, sending dates and sugar-candy and cloth to far-flung lands. (We think little of this but the 'Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir', the first line of John Masefield's poem 'Cargoes', actually refers to Nalla Sopara.) Bhadreshwar, one of the earliest of these port towns, has a history that Mehrdad Shokkoohy has traced back to the pre-Christian era. Those were glorious times with dates and cloth and later fish going up and down the coast. The sailors kept logs which were known as Roznamas, a term that sounds so beautiful that I am tempted to rechristen all my diaries into Roznamas. This is the lure of the sea, where the nakhuda steers by the stars, and is aided by the Dariyari or sea calendar and dhinghies ply the coast. I should have liked to know what samudra phin is but there was no explanation. One could have hoped for better editing from Primus, for this is really something an editor points out to the author who may be too close to the work to know what might need explication. As I read about the roznamas which turn up on Page 194, I longed to see one. And then my wish was granted a hundred-odd pages later, meticulous lines of numbers that meant the difference between a good day to sail and a bad day to sail. If you are of the kind who thinks that there is much to be said in old wisdom, perhaps you do not want to set out for a sea voyage from anywhere on the coast of Kutch on any day other than Monday or Thursday when 'the sea and wind remain calm and pleasant'. (Sunday: thunderstorms; Tuesday: heavy rain; Wednesday: big waves called zugars; Friday: no stars, thunderstorms, zugars; Saturday: profound but silent waves.) A word about the photographs. Their quality points to the nature of the enterprise; this is a passion project and so most of the photographs have been taken by the author or by others. No professional seems to have been involved. This means that one does not get as much as one would like out of the visual material. On page 393, we have two pictures and the captions read: 'a Roghan artist painting on cloth, Nirona, central Kutch' on one and 'Bell-metal work, Nirona, central Kutch'. The photographs are both credited to Ranjitsinh Jadeja. The Roghan artist is hard at work so we do not see his face. Nor do we see the work. The bell-metal worker is holding up too bells but we cannot see them either. Neither man is named which follows the unfortunate tradition of not naming the folk artisan. At a time when the highest in the land can turn their guns on words like secularism and call them wounds on the body politic, it is good to read about the syncretism of the Kutch area. 'The Solahkhambi Masjid and the Dargah of Ibrahim Pir, also known as Pir La'l Shahbaz, which date back from the twelfth century, are of great architectural significance. Shokoohy states that they are the first Islamic structures to be built in the Indian subcontinent.' They were given permission to build by the Jain council. Perhaps this comes from the balancing act that was political life in the area, with the Maharao or ruler always having to deal with the Bhayad or Royal Brotherhood of which he was the titular head but whose power held his in check. Where power is shared, it is an easy lesson to learn: you take everyone with you or you end up alone. And no one survives deserts alone. The entry of the British did much to upset the balance but even there we find some extraordinary figures that Dossal's scholarship has excavated for us: Lieutenant James McMurdo, for instance, once visited Kutch in the guise of a sadhu. 'Based in Bhuj's main bazaar he gained a following and was venerated as Bhuria Baba. This ploy served him well and he was able to obtain valuable information about political developments in the capital which was then passed on to his superiors in Baroda and Bombay.' What are our scriptwriters doing? Not a single film on Baba McMurdo? Perhaps Dossal's book will find its way into the hands of some enterprising young filmmaker of Kutchi origin in Britain or Los Angeles. Stranger things have happened on the crossroads of culture. Jerry Pinto is a poet, novelist, short story writer, translator, and journalist. His latest novel, The Education of Yuri, was published in 2022 by Speaking Tiger Books.
