Operation Jackpot, 1971: The naval commandos who sank ships and strangled East Pakistan’s river lifelines

Bangladeshi guerrillas beat a victim as they torture and execute four men suspected of collaborating with Pakistani militiamen in Dacca, Bangladesh during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. (Credit: AP)

• Bengali naval commandos disrupted East Pakistan's river logistics
• Operation Jackpot's August 1971 attacks hit four key ports
• Sabotage forced Pakistan to divert troops and strained logistics

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When people talk about the 1971 war at sea, the conversation usually jumps to missile boats off Karachi. But in East Pakistan, the most disruptive naval story was not a fleet action at all.

It was a quiet, riverine campaign carried out by frogmen, many of them Bengali defectors and volunteers, trained in India, and pushed back across the border to attack shipping from underneath.

The best-known strikes happened in mid-August 1971, when multiple ports were hit in a coordinated night of explosions. The overall effort is commonly associated with the codename Operation Jackpot, though Indian accounts also refer to the naval piece as Operation X.

Either way, the operational idea was the same: make the waterways unsafe, choke movement, and puncture the sense that the Pakistani state had restored control.

Why shipping mattered in East Pakistan

East Pakistan’s geography made water movement central to everything. Roads and railways existed, but rivers were the real logistics network. Ports like Chittagong and Mongla connected the province to global shipping; river hubs like Narayanganj and Chandpur mattered for internal cargo movement, ferries, and military resupply.

Disrupting that network did not just create economic pain. It forced the Pakistani military to divert manpower into security, convoying, searches, curfews, and patrols, while also slowing the movement of fuel, stores, and reinforcements.

Analysts have described Middle Eastern airspace as a “bridge” in modern aviation. In 1971 East Pakistan, the river system played a similar role for day-to-day control. Hit the bridge and everything reroutes, slows, and clogs.

Building a commando force from defectors and volunteers

After Operation Searchlight and the early months of fighting, large numbers of Bengali personnel and civilians moved across the border. Indian planning shifted toward building a sustained guerrilla capability that could keep Pakistani forces off- balance.

Within that broader effort, Bengali defectors and volunteers were structured into a naval special force trained for underwater sabotage, particularly using limpet mines and demolition charges. Indian Express reporting places this naval component at roughly 550 personnel.

The training story that stands out in most accounts is that this was not a conventional special forces pipeline. It was fast, pragmatic and built around one job: get close to a vessel or jetty at night, place a magnetic explosive, and disappear into a river system that could hide you if you knew it.

Descriptions of the programme emphasise swimmer training, navigation, handling timed charges, and operating in small teams under extreme pressure.

Plassey and the Indian Navy’s covert hand

Multiple accounts of Operation X describe Indian Navy intelligence and planners shaping the training and tasking, with camps in India including the Plassey area often mentioned as a key node. The aim was not to create a showcase unit but a repeatable sabotage machine that could keep hitting targets across a wide riverine map.

Gateway House’s summary of Operation X frames it as a turning point precisely because it used trained Bangladeshi fighters, enabled by India, to do naval damage out of proportion to their numbers.

There is also a practical reason the Indian Navy route made sense. Mining harbours and sinking vessels does not require air superiority or big ships if you can get swimmers in close. It does, however, require specialist training, reliable explosives, and careful timing. That combination is hard to improvise without institutional support.

The night the ports lit up

The best-known episode linked to Operation Jackpot is the coordinated commando action against shipping in and around four key locations, including Chittagong and Mongla, with additional strikes linked to river hubs like Narayanganj and Chandpur.

Accounts describe teams moving into position and attaching magnetic mines to vessels during the night, with blasts timed to go off in a narrow window so the attacks would land almost simultaneously across different ports.

The effect was psychological as much as physical: it told soldiers, administrators, and shipping agents that the river and harbour system was penetrable, and that the state could not guarantee “normal” commerce.

Indian Express’s Military Digest piece treats this as the moment when the Mukti Bahini’s organised sabotage capability became unmistakable, describing a deliberately created naval special force being used for underwater sabotage.

What was achieved and why it mattered

There are two ways to measure success here. One is tonnage and vessels damaged. The other is disruption, because even the fear of sabotage can freeze movement if insurers, operators, or port authorities decide the risk is unacceptable.

Contemporary and retrospective accounts converge on the idea that port activity and confidence were rattled. The Print’s excerpt on the secret commando group describes the operation as spooking Pakistan and giving the Mukti Bahini a significant boost.

Later reporting from The New Indian Express, tied to discussion of the book Operation X, describes a single-night assault across four ports spread across a huge operational area, framing it as an unusually scaled commando effort that paralysed shipping in East Pakistan.

The campaign did not end with one night

The August attacks became the headline, but the riverine campaign continued with further attempts to damage vessels, harbours, and infrastructure, alongside other Mukti Bahini sabotage actions on bridges, rail, and power.

Indian Express’s Vijay Diwas explainer notes Operation Jackpot in the broader sense as India’s programme to recruit, train, arm, equip, supply and advise Mukti Bahini fighters, and places the

escalation of sabotage within that expanding support structure.

This matters because it explains why Pakistan’s problem was not one spectacular raid. It was the accumulation: repeated attacks, repeated security sweeps, repeated delays, and the nagging awareness that every ferry, lighter, or jetty could be a target.

How the Pakistan side was forced to respond

Once you accept the possibility of swimmer attacks, your defensive workload explodes. You need patrol boats, lighting, checks, exclusion zones, barriers, and manpower to guard not just military facilities but commercial ships and river crossings.

Even if you prevent half the attacks, you can still lose the bigger game because the defensive posture ties down troops and clogs logistics. The logic was similar to other guerrilla maritime campaigns: the sabotage is cheap relative to what it costs the opponent to defend.

Gateway House’s account of Operation X highlights the asymmetry: a small force producing outsized strategic effect.

Where “Operation Jackpot” and “Operation X” fit together

Readers often get confused by the labels because they appear differently across sources. Indian Express uses “Operation Jackpot” for the wider Indian-backed training, supply and advising effort for Mukti Bahini guerrillas, including the naval commando element.

Other accounts foreground “Operation X” as the Indian Navy’s covert naval commando programme within that larger frame, with the mid-August port attacks often treated as the breakout success that proved the concept.

In practical terms, you can think of Operation Jackpot as the ecosystem and Operation X as one of its sharpest instruments.

The legacy

Operation Jackpot’s naval commando story is not remembered because it was glamorous. It is remembered because it was disruptive in a way conventional naval forces often cannot be in a river-delta theatre. It exploited geography, forced defensive overreach, and helped break the illusion that East Pakistan’s waterways were controllable.

It also shaped how 1971 is understood beyond the final 13 days. By the time open war arrived in December, Pakistan’s forces in the east had already been living with months of sabotage, uncertainty and stretched logistics.

The river war did not win the conflict on its own, but it made the environment harsher, more expensive, and more psychologically corrosive for the defenders, which is exactly what a well-run covert campaign is supposed to do.