The end of Portuguese India: Goa, Daman and Diu, December 1961

At noon on 18 December 1961 three Indian frigates turned towards the harbour of Mormugão at speed and opened fire. Inside the bay lay the Afonso de Albuquerque, a 27-year-old sloop built in Newcastle and the biggest Portuguese warship in India. Her captain, António da Cunha Aragão, ordered the anchor chain cut, opened fire and took the ship out of the harbour to meet them.3 sources3 sources

The Indians sounded a single word in Morse. In the noise of battle the Portuguese could not decode it at once; Aragão ceased fire, then resumed before the last two letters had come through. The word was “surrender”. The Indian account says the frigates fired warning shots and the sloop answered with her guns.2 sources2 sources

The fight was unequal. According to the Portuguese Navy's own account, Aragão's four 120 mm guns fired two rounds a minute, while each frigate had four 101 mm guns firing 60 rounds a minute, aimed by fire-control systems.1 source1 source

A shell hit the gunnery director, killing the junior telegraphist Rosário da Piedade and badly wounding the captain, who passed command to his second-in-command with an order not to surrender. Then the engineers, cut off from the bridge, mistook an order to flood the magazines for the start of the plan to scuttle the ship and wrecked her engines. She was run aground off Bambolim beach at about 12:35. By 12:50, after some 400 rounds, the crew began to abandon her, most of them swimming ashore. The flag stayed up.1 source1 source

Valentino Viegas, then a young Goan, watched from the hill at Nerul across the bay and could not understand why the ship had been beached. That evening he heard the tracks of Indian tanks rolling towards Panjim, the capital. The next day, after 451 years, Portuguese rule in Goa was over.2 sources2 sources

Afonso de Albuquerque, the conqueror the sloop was named after, stormed Goa on 25 November 1510, and Portugal won the right to a fortress at Diu in 1535. Goa became the capital of the Estado da Índia, the “State of India”, a chain of ports and forts that at its height reached from East Africa to Japan. By the twentieth century only Goa, the coastal town of Daman, the island of Diu and the inland enclaves of Dadra and Nagar Haveli were left.3 sources3 sources

When Britain left India in 1947, the new Indian government asked Portugal to hand over its territories. Lisbon refused. Portugal was then ruled by the Estado Novo, the authoritarian “New State” led by António de Oliveira Salazar, which held that its territories were not colonies but provinces of Portugal itself, and therefore not open to negotiation. France gave up its small Indian possessions; Portugal kept its own.3 sources3 sources

India withdrew its diplomatic mission from Lisbon in June 1953 and then restricted travel through Indian territory to and from the Portuguese enclaves, which choked their trade. For Salazar, Goa's value was not economic. As he later told the National Assembly, it counted “above all as the landmark of one of the greatest happenings in the history of the world”, the meeting of East and West that the Portuguese voyages had begun.2 sources2 sources

The first territories went in 1954. In late July and early August activists overthrew Portuguese authority in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, two pockets of land surrounded by Indian territory inland from Daman. India would not let Portuguese troops cross its territory to take them back.2 sources2 sources

On 15 August 1955, the eighth anniversary of Indian independence, about 3,000 unarmed volunteers, or satyagrahis, tried to march into Goa, Daman and Diu. The first group to cross into Goa, carrying Indian flags at Patradevi, met machine-gun fire. An Indian military account gives 22 shot dead and 225 wounded; the Government of Goa counts around 74 satyagrahis killed over the whole campaign.2 sources2 sources

Portugal took the enclaves to the International Court of Justice in The Hague on 22 December 1955. In its judgment of 12 April 1960 the court found, by 11 votes to 4, that in 1954 Portugal had a right of passage through Indian territory for private persons, civil officials and goods. By 8 votes to 7 it found that the right did not cover armed forces, armed police, arms or ammunition, and by 9 votes to 6 it held that India had not breached its obligations by refusing passage.1 source1 source

Tension rose further after Portuguese troops on the island of Anjediva fired on the Indian passenger ship Sabarmati, wounding its chief engineer; by the Indian account several Indian fishermen were also killed. The Indian Navy began patrolling off Goa. The army gave the task to Major General K. P. Candeth's 17th Infantry Division, with the 50th Parachute Brigade, under the overall command of Lieutenant General J. N. Chaudhuri. The aircraft carrier Vikrant, two cruisers, a destroyer, frigates, Canberra bombers and Hunter and Mystère fighters were assigned.2 sources2 sources

Salazar knew Goa could not be held. His plan, as he explained it to the National Assembly afterwards, was to keep just enough troops there to force India into a large military operation that would shock the world, and to gain time to protest at the United Nations. On 11 December he asked Britain, Portugal's oldest ally, what help it could give. London replied that there would be “inevitable limitations” on any help against another member of the Commonwealth.1 source1 source

On 12 December Vassalo e Silva ordered the families of Portuguese soldiers evacuated by sea, and by 16 December a group of 250 women and children had reached Lisbon. On 14 December a message from Salazar reached the governor in Goa. On 15 December the UN secretary-general, U Thant, appealed to both governments to negotiate; Salazar replied the same day that he would talk wherever and however New Delhi wished.2 sources2 sources

Speaking three weeks later, Salazar made no secret of what he had asked for. “For me it was horrible to think that this might mean a total sacrifice but I recommended and expected it as the best service that could be rendered to the future of the Nation,” he told the Assembly. The governor, he added, had replied thanking him for his confidence.1 source1 source

The Portuguese defence plan, known as Plano Sentinela, was to fall back in stages from the borders to the coast, blowing up bridges and roads to slow the enemy, and to make a last stand around Mormugão and Vasco da Gama. Captain Carlos Azeredo, who commanded Goa's police, later called it a plan drawn up with ruler and set square in Lisbon by people who had no idea what Goa, Daman and Diu were like.3 sources3 sources

In Goa there was little fighting on land. Indian columns came in from the north and east; the Portuguese withdrew, blowing the bridge at Banastarim behind them. João Aranha, who commanded a police division in the north, remembered Indian aircraft flying over his men without firing: it was demoralising, he said, because they understood they had no chance. Correio da Manhã's account describes rifles dating from the First World War and ammunition so decayed that rounds often failed to fire.2 sources2 sources

There was more fighting at Diu and Daman, and at sea. At Diu, Lieutenant Jorge Oliveira e Carmo took the small patrol boat Vega out against an Indian cruiser; Indian jets strafed her, and he and two sailors were killed. On Anjediva, an Indian naval landing party lost seven dead and nineteen wounded when, by the Indian account, it was fired on after a white flag was shown.3 sources3 sources

By the morning of 19 December Panjim was surrounded, and the governor asked the bishop to seek terms from the Indian command. Sources place the surrender anywhere from 14:00, the hour Valentino Viegas gives, to 20:30 that evening, the Indian account's time. That account counts a 48-hour operation; Portuguese accounts, such as the Museu do Aljube's, speak of 36 hours.5 sources5 sources

Nobody agrees on the numbers. Salazar himself spoke of 3,500 soldiers from Portugal and 900 Indo-Portuguese against an Indian army of between 30,000 and 40,000. An Indian account in the journal of the United Service Institution of India lists 3,995 Portuguese combat soldiers, 1,040 police and 400 border guards, after a garrison of 12,000 in 1960 had been cut.2 sources2 sources

The Indians held their prisoners in four camps set up in former Portuguese barracks, two at Ponda and others at Alparqueiros and Aguada. Veterans remembered black-eyed beans every day and cardboard to sleep on. Vassalo e Silva was kept apart in a house at Ponda with his two aides. There, according to Correio da Manhã's account, Salazar's special envoy Jorge Jardim visited him and left him a cyanide capsule, which he did not use.1 source1 source

The Museu do Aljube records that Nehru offered to free them without conditions, while Salazar, who wanted an example made of the defeated army, raised obstacle after obstacle to their return. “The Indians told us we were only there because the Portuguese government didn't want us back,” Carlos Azeredo said. “And they were right.”2 sources2 sources

Repatriation came only in May 1962, by an airlift from Goa to Karachi in Pakistan and then on three ships to Lisbon. Nuno Vassalo e Silva, the governor's grandson and a historian, says that when the men came ashore at Alcântara soldiers stood waiting with rifles, pointed but lowered. “It was a humiliation,” he said.2 sources2 sources

According to Correio da Manhã, eight officers, the governor-general among them, were dismissed from the army; five more were compulsorily retired and eight suspended for six months. Vassalo e Silva was expelled for disobeying Salazar and picked up a cruel nickname, “Vacila e Salva”, roughly “wavers and saves himself”. Lisbon's toponymy office records that he was reinstated after the revolution of 25 April 1974. He died in Lisbon on 11 August 1985.2 sources2 sources

On 18 December, at Portugal's request, the UN Security Council met in New York. Portugal's representative, Vasco Vieira Garin, called it a fully premeditated and unprovoked aggression. India's, C. S. Jha, asked how Portugal had come by its “so-called sovereign rights” in India, which he said derived from “a naked, unabashed application of force”. A ceasefire resolution moved by the United States, Britain, France and Turkey won seven votes to four but fell to a Soviet veto.3 sources3 sources

Salazar answered in the National Assembly on 3 January 1962, in a speech read out for him by the Assembly's president because his voice was failing. He called the loss of Goa one of the greatest disasters in Portuguese history and refused any treaty. He announced that the deputies elected for Goa, Daman and Diu would keep their seats in the Lisbon parliament.2 sources2 sources

In India, Goa, Daman and Diu were run by a military governor and then as a Union Territory, and a citizenship order in 1962 made Goans born before 20 December 1961 Indian citizens. Only after the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 overthrew the Estado Novo did Lisbon change course. On 31 December 1974 India and Portugal restored diplomatic relations and signed a treaty recognising Indian sovereignty over all the former territories, backdated to the day each had joined India. It came into force on 3 June 1975.3 sources3 sources

Goa went its own way inside India. In an opinion poll on 16 January 1967, the first held in the country, Goans voted against merging with the neighbouring state of Maharashtra. On 4 February 1987 the legislative assembly made Konkani the official language, and on 30 May 1987 Goa became India's 25th state.1 source1 source

Some Portuguese law survives. In 2019 the Supreme Court of India confirmed that the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, as applied in Goa and partly replaced in 2016 by a Goan succession act, still governs succession for people domiciled there, and its judges called Goa a shining example of a state with one civil code for all religions.1 source1 source

So does a door to Europe. Portuguese nationality law of 1975 lets Goans born before 20 December 1961, and their descendants to the third generation, claim Portuguese citizenship. Few did until Portugal joined what is now the European Union in 1986; then demand grew so much that Portugal opened a consulate in Goa in 1994. Under Indian law, those who register lose their Indian citizenship.1 source1 source

India marks the anniversary each year. On 26 August 2026 India's defence minister, Rajnath Singh, opened the redeveloped martyrs' memorial at Patradevi, where the satyagrahis of 1955 first crossed the border. Valentino Viegas suspects that few passers-by in Lisbon, or in Panjim, would now recognise the date. The governor's grandson, who first visited Goa in 1996 and was received in the old governor's palace with the furniture of Portuguese times still inside, warns his compatriots against nostalgia: Goa, he says, has a cosmopolitan identity of its own.5 sources5 sources