The Navy's Submarine Arm dates from the commissioning of INS Kalvari at Riga on 8 December 1967, marked each year as Submarine Day.
Riga, 8 December 1967
The Indian tricolour was raised on INS Kalvari, a Type 641 Foxtrot class submarine, at Riga in present-day Latvia on 8 December 1967. The commissioning laid the foundation of the Submarine Arm, and the Navy marks the date as Submarine Day.
Kalvari left Riga on 18 April 1968 and reached Visakhapatnam that July. The first four submarines arrived between 1968 and 1970, and all were based there. Visakhapatnam also holds the arm's first base, INS Virbahu, and its training school, INS Satavahana.
Four boats in the 1971 war
Four submarines were deployed in the 1971 war, in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. The Ministry of Defence says their presence restricted enemy operations at sea.
Personnel of the arm received one Maha Vir Chakra, two Vir Chakras and one Shaurya Chakra for the war, with a number of Mentions-in-Despatches.
INS Kursura was among the first four. Inducted on 18 December 1969, she saw action in 1971 and was decommissioned on 28 February 2001 after 31 years. Since August 2002 she has stood on the Beach Road at Visakhapatnam as a submarine museum. The first Kalvari was decommissioned on 31 May 1996.
The second Kalvari and the President's Colour
By the Ministry's count in 2017, the Navy had operated six classes of submarine, conventional and nuclear.
That year was the arm's Golden Jubilee, declared the Year of the Submarine.
The name returned on 14 December 2017, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi commissioned a new INS Kalvari at the Naval Dockyard, Mumbai. She was the first of six Scorpene class submarines built at Mazagon Dock with Naval Group of France under Project 75.
Six days earlier, on 8 December 2017, President Ram Nath Kovind had presented the President's Colour to the arm at Visakhapatnam. Rear Admiral Veenam Srinivas, Flag Officer Submarines, received it.
Cover image: Raja Ramakrishna Chinna Swamy Naidu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:INS_Kursura_Submarine_Museum.jpg