The IC 814 hijacking should rankle in our minds not so much for what Pakistan and its proxies were able to pull off, as for the manner in which the incident was comprehensively mishandled by New Delhi.
Instead of preventing the plane from taking off from Amritsar, the then Government failed to issue instructions to immobilize the aircraft while it was being re-fuelled at the tarmac.
Two senior ministers are on record that this was, ironically enough, the government's precise priority. Jaswant Singh, the foreign minister, who was subsequently to scandalously personally chaperone terrorists aboard his aircraft to Kandahar, records his frustrations in his book, A Call to Honour: In service of Emergent India, (page 237). “Get your bloody fingers out now. For heaven’s sake, do anything, don’t let the f.....g aircraft leave Amritsar!”
His senior cabinet colleague, Lal Kishan Advani, the Sardar Patel wannabe of those days and the Bharat Ratna awardee now had this to say in his memoirs, My Coutnry, My Life (p 621): “In the wake of sudden developments, the Prime Minister called an emergency meeting at his residence. It was decided the first priority was to immobilise the plane at Amritsar and make it impossible for it to take off to any other destination outside the country.”
What then went wrong?
The then RAW chief, A S Dulat, who had the misfortune of having both the Kargil and the IC 814 fiascos blow up on his face, told this reporter: “Let me say we goofed up!”
K P S Gill blamed the Cabinet Secretary, Prabhat Kumar, who was handling the Crisis Management Group which was monitoring the hijacking which took place as soon as the aircraft entered Indian airspace on Christmas eve in December 1999. The ambit of the blame is wider.
Roughly, this is the story: The Air traffic controller at Delhi knew around 4.40 pm that IC 814 from Kathmandu had been hijacked and it was heading north-westwards. Given the fuel situation, the security planners knew that there were four options available before the hijackers: Amritsar, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, or militarised Jammu.
There was time to prepare for contingencies then, on the lines of the thoughts expressed by Jaswant Singh and L K Advani. Around 6 pm Amritsar ATC knew the plane was coming its way. The IC 814 landed 40 minutes later. It stayed on the tarmac for a further 40 minutes, waiting for fuel.
Unfortunately, at that time there was no anti-hijacking force in Amritsar; they were stationed in Manesar, Haryana, some 490 km away. There was no line of communication with the hijackers. New Delhi had no idea how many hijackers there were. There was a RAW officer on board, Sashi Bhushan Tomar, then first secretary at the Indian embassy at Kathmandu, said to be related by marriage to a senior bureaucrat, which is neither here not there. There was no knowledge of what sort of weapons the hijackers had or how many.
The Standard Operating Procedure in case of hijacks is to stop the aircraft. When IC 814 was touching down in Amritsar, the CMG was still debating whether the aircraft should be stopped. It was not discussing how to stop it. Consequently there were no orders issued to that effect. The then Punjab police chief is scandalously on record that he learnt of the hijacking from television, whereas the instructions to him were to stop the aircraft at any cost.
No Charitable Way To Look At This
It is clear there was no decision to that effect even as the plane took off at 7: 40 pm or thereabouts after sitting patiently like a duck on the tarmac, even though there had been a clear three-hour window of opportunity to decide. There is no charitable way to look at this.
Worse was to follow. After Rupin Katyal's throat was slit and his body dumped on the tarmac of the Al Minhad military airport, the aircraft was finally allowed to land at Kandahar, where the Taliban fronted for the ISI and negotiated the release of, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. And Jaswant Singh volunteered to personally deliver them, gift-wrapped and beribboned, to the hijackers at Kandahar.
Omar as we all know, went on to slit the throat of Daniel Pearl, and Masood Azhar, got married in Pakistan, and spawned the Jaish e Mohammed, which was to orchestrate the attack on our parliament two years later, as a return gift.
Current Debate Is Bogus
The current debate over the IC 814 is a bit bogus. Let's face it: a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist no matter what the assumed name is. The questions we should be really asking are: How did the then government allow IC-814 to fly out of Amritsar? Should the government have allowed the three terrorists to be exchanged? Finally, could not a slow acting poison be administered to them before they were let loose, once it was clear that these three were on the long-list of the terrorists demands? It is all right to go knock out the bad guys in Pakistan but sometimes such charity begins at home.
