Hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal lied about being a carrier pilot

High-flying hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal pleaded guilty last Thursday to charges of illegal campaign contributions to three US candidates via straw donors. His former buddies in the Indian Navy say he is also guilty of another, admittedly far lesser, offence: consistently lying about being a former Indian naval carrier pilot.

In several press interviews over the past few decades, Chatwal, 70, claimed to have attended naval flying school and flying from the India's first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. His former naval buddies, however, say Chatwal was a rookie pilot who failed to make the grade.

Vice Admiral (retired) Vinod Pasricha, a veteran carrier pilot first smelt a rat while researching his 2010 book "Downwind Four Green" on the navy's Sea Hawk fighter squadron. It was an aircraft type Chatwal would have flown off the decks of the Vikrant. Admiral Pasricha , however, did not find any mention of a carrier pilot named Chatwal. "There was no flying school in the navy (naval pilots then trained at the IAF's training school at Bidar). Chatwal joined the navy as a naval aviation cadet and was thrown out of flying after only about seven sorties."

Colleagues in Chatwal's 99th general duties pilot course at Bidar call him a high-flyer for his brazen self-promotion. During his Services Selection Board (SSB) interview in Dehra Dun in 1966, he told the GTO he had flying experience. When he failed to make the grade, he flew around 14 hours didn't make the solo grade, Chatwal joked he was talking about "flying kites."

Chatwal left the navy and moved to Ethiopia as a teacher where he also ran an Indian restaurant. He left Ethiopia after the collapse of the Haile Selassie dictatorship in 1974, moved to Canada and from there, to the US. The naval carrier pilot legend may have come handy to break into the US restaurant scene in the mid-1980s. Prominent US politicians including Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Senior have been carrier pilots. Chatwal told Forbes magazine in 1987 that he was 'trained as a fighter pilot and assigned to India's only aircraft carrier, the Vikrant, in the mid 1960s.'

Lieutenant 'Yogi' Saxena, who retired as a naval pilot after eight years of service and is now settled in Duluth, Georgia, recalls how he ran into his former course mate Chatwal at his Bombay Palace restaurant in New York in 1984. Saxena had moved to the US in 1976. Chatwal, invited his friend to the opening of his a second Bombay Palace restaurant in Los Angeles evidently to burnish his reputation as a carrier pilot. "At the restaurant, Chatwal, boasted of being a naval aviator on the Vikrant with me. I immediately corrected him. A piqued Chatwal broke all contact."

Nearly three decades later, Saxena says he is still mystified why Chatwal insisted on parroting the carrier- pilot yarn. "I guess it gave him a social standing he thought he lacked," he says of the hotelier who is now facing a lengthy prison sentence.