(Top) Madhvendra Singh, Arun Prakash

New Delhi, July 31: The key to Admiral Madhvendra Singh’s crowning glory, many said of the Rajput who retired as chief of the naval staff today after two years, lay with a non-resident Bengali, Commander Satyabrata Dam. In one of his regular notes to his subordinates titled Madhu’s memo, Admiral Singh ordered Commander Dam to scale the Everest.

Dam was “wasting away” in the outbacks of the navy when Singh discovered that he was an ambitious mountaineer. So, Singh called him over to New Delhi from his posting in the western naval command and asked him if he could scale Mount Everest. Dam said he would give it a shot.

After training for a year, Dam picked his team and told the navy chief he was going to scale the Everest from the most difficult Chinese side. In a powerpoint presentation to the chief, Dam pointed out the route he would take. Singh interrupted him during the presentation and asked what he and his climbers on the final assault were going to do the night before summitting.

“We will hammer nails into the cliff,” Dam said, “and string hammocks across them to sleep.”

“No way,” said Singh. He ordered the team to rest the night at an advance base camp.

After Dam’s team summitted, climbers from other countries at the base camp frequently asked them what the navy was doing on Mount Everest. Dam was ready with an answer, quoting so many mountaineers before him — “because it is there”.

Singh, a gunnery specialist, took over as the chief of navy staff in December 2001, just as Operation Parakram, the largest mobilisation of the Indian armed forces was taking place. The gunboat diplomacy crafted by the then NDA government meant that he had to order several of his western fleet into the seas in preparation to blockade Karachi and also order his submarines from their base at Visakhapatnam on the east coast to sail into the Arabian Sea.

That was the closest Singh came to actually commanding a navy at war, a dream for any commander of any self-respecting armed force anywhere in the world. The winding down of Parakram meant that Singh had to order his ships home without firing a shot.

It was shortly after that that Singh decided there were other ways for the navy to grab attention, one of which took his fancy, and that was to put submariners on top of Mount Everest.

After his retirement, Singh will go down in history as the chief who coined the slogan — “from the deep blue seas to the highest peak” — for the Indian Navy.

In his last hurrah, Singh showed that when he described India as a “maritime nation”, he meant that a non-coastal person, a Rajput like him, in India is as much a natural in the navy as anyone else.