Aquarter of a century ago, the New Year parties in the national Capital were family or at best colony affair. It were still to go commercial with bonanza’s being heaped by the restaurants and hotels. So 24 December 1999 was to be the last Christmas Eve of the century. The middle class apartment block, the word condominium was still to become part of parlance, where this writer lived had gathered on the rooftop to celebrate.
Most of the people in the newspaper office that evening had left early, soon after the night shift reporter had arrived. Most of them had a party to attend and the regulars to the Press Club an excuse to leave early.
My neighbourhood was pretty happy see me home early and join the party.
Given one’s assignment as the head of the reporting unit, reaching home was mostly at an hour when people would be in bed.
The assignment nonetheless had also given me a mobile phone which no other party maker in that middle class apartment possessed that evening. Midway through the party, the phone rang, it was my editor on the other end. He had wanted a story on an Indian Airlines plane coming from Kathmandu to New Delhi, which had been hijacked.
The society was still to overcome the emotional trauma caused by Kargil war earlier in the year. That evening I did not want to play a spoiler by breaking news of another trauma awaiting, I quietly slipped out to be back on duty. There were just two hours left before the edition went to print and a story had to be filed, yes filed and not cooked.
An Airbus A300, Indian Airlines Flight IC 814, had 176 people on board, including 15 crew members,soon after entering Indian airspace, had been hijacked by five armed men belonging to Pakistan-based terrorist organization Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. The hijackers took control of the aircraft using knives and other weapons, which is believed to have been smuggled aboard due to lax security checks in Kathmandu.
The next week was a taxing time for reporters especially those from print who then and even today believe in the ethics of responsible journalism. A quarter of a century later, the terror attack on tourists in Pahalgam and later Operation Sindoor made one recall two definite connects between IC 814 hijack and these two incidents. The images from Pahalgam of the newly married Indian Navy officer and terror victim Lieutenant Vinay Narwal’s corpse and his wife Himanshi sitting beside it brought back the memory of a similar incident from IC814.
One passenger of the ill-fated plane, 25-year-old Rupin Katyal, who was returning from honeymoon with his wife, was stabbed to death by the hijackers to establish the seriousness of their intention.
The next recollection from IC 814 came alive when the government last week announced the successful execution of Operation Sindoor and specially mentioned about the demolition of stronghold of Jaish-e-Mohammed and killing of the family members of its founder Azhar Masood. The star-crossed plane, after stops at Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai, had landed at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
This area was under the control of the Taliban, who then were under control of the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan. For the next six days, the hijackers held the passengers hostage in extremely cold conditions, demanding the release of three militants namely Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargarjailed in high security prisons in India.
Finally then External
Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, after several failed rounds of negotiations flew the three terrorists in an Indian Airlines plane to Kandhar. On their release, the Talibans facilitated their escape from the tarmac itself.
Nevertheless Singh managed to bring the hostages safely back to Indira Gandhi International Airport. This reporter was there in the designated Press area as the hostages came out and they were quickly whisked away in the waiting vehicles.
The midnight of the turn of the century was spent in the newspaper officer typing out, as the editor wanted, a ‘tight and crisp’ copy. The nation woke up to the first day of the new century to read the headlines of passengers back safely.
The week of Yuletide that year indeed was long as trauma trailed city.
The closure has come 25 years later in the killing during Operation Sindoor of Rauf Azhar, the man who masterminded the hijack.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice