Get your bloody fingers out now. For heaven’s sake, do anything, don’t let the f.....g aircraft leave Amritsar!” That was Jaswant Singh, the former foreign minister and soldier, shouting into the phone, abandoning diplomatic decorum, when he learnt that IC 814 had been hijacked. (A Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India, page 237).
“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.” That was L K Advani, the Sardar Patel wannabe, in his memoirs, My Country My Life (p 621).
“Let me say we goofed up!” That is A S Dulat, who was the chief of the RAW when IC 814 was taken over by hijackers almost as soon as it entered Indian airspace on Christmas eve in 1999.
K P S Gill, who killed at least one hijack attempt on the tarmac in Amritsar, blames the then Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, who was heading the Crisis Management Group, for not ordering the tyres of the plane to be deflated.
Why single him out? We know the story roughly: Delhi Air Traffic Controller knew around 4:40 pm that IC 814 had been hijacked; it was flying north-westwards. There were four options available before the hijackers given the fuel situation: Amritsar, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, or heavily militarised Jammu. Around 6 pm Amritsar ATC knew it had got lucky again. The plane landed 40 minutes later, and stayed there for a further 40 minutes before waving bye bye. Hindsight makes us wiser but consider: when the IC 814 was on the Amritsar tarmac waiting for fuel, we did not have an anti-hijacking force in Amritsar; they were in faraway Manesar; we did not have a line of communication with the hijackers; we had no idea how many hijackers there were – RAW had some idea but hardly precise. We did not know how many weapons or what sort of weapons the hijackers had. At Amritsar, the hijackers sent out a tough message that became clear later: remember Rupin Katyal? His throat was slit in Amritsar, his body dumped at al Minhad military airport, but the Americans there had been too busy celebrating Christmas to deal with terrorism.
Normally in case of hijackings, the Standard Operating Procedure is to stop the aircraft. What happened? When IC 814 was touching down in Amritsar, the CMG was debating whether the aircraft should be stopped. It was not discussing how to stop it. There were no orders issued to that effect. The then Punjab police chief is scandalously apparently on record that he learnt of the hijacking from the ubiquitous television, not through a CMG order to stop the flight at any cost.
This much is clear: there was no decision even as the plane took off at 7: 40 pm or thereabouts after sitting like a duck on the tarmac. There had been a clear three-hour window of opportunity to decide. The charitable way to look at it is none of our governments is prepared to do it.
It wouldn’t be surprising if we ultimately discovered that even as the plane took off, some of the CMG members had barely got to the meeting and missed out on the customary chai and pakodas: if there are two ways for a bureaucrat to play safe, he takes the safer option. That’s Murphy’s Law.
In Assault at Mogadishu, two journalists (Peter Koch and Kai Herman) from Stern tell a riveting story of the hijack of a Lufthansa 737 aircraft from Majorca with 86 on board, led by a “wildly unstable sadist”, which hopped from Cyprus to Dubai to Aden and finally to Mogadishu in godforsaken Somalia.
Thereafter, 28 German commandoes landed with lights out, crept under the wings while a diversionary fire was created on the runway. As the hijackers responded by moving to the cockpit to check it out, the commandoes “leapt on the wings, blew in the emergency doors and tossed in special stun grenades that temporarily blinded and deafened the occupants.” Then the Germans burst in, killing three terrorists.
At Entebbe, where an Air France plane had been taken, Israeli commandoes flew half-way across the world, “conducted a miniature invasion” in hostile Ugandan territory. About 50 died. The German hard-line action came after both Chancellor Helmut Shmidt and Opposition leader Helmut Kohl had agreed in principle on a hard line. Is that even possible here? Imagine an all-party meeting with no finger-pointing afterwards. Somehow that sounds corny.
Once the bird had flown into Kandahar, as the then RAW chief was to remark to this reporter later, “we were in a shithole”. Here is a related anecdote: the wife and two children (both boys) of Taliban chieftain Mullah Omar’s doctor lived in Delhi, courtesy the Intelligence Bureau, which looked after their schooling, housing, everything. Every time Mullah Omar’s doctor wanted to see his family, he had one of his sons flown into Kabul and handed him over to the Taliban as collateral and only then could the doctor come to Delhi to see his wife and the other son.
The captive son would be sent back to Delhi only after Mullah Omar’s doctor returned. This was in ’97-’98. Once the doctor had a message from Mullah Omar: the Taliban chief wanted to open a channel of communication with India, and suggested the meet in a third country. The emissary conveyed that the Taliban knew that notwithstanding the claims of Pakistan, only India had the capability to help them out reconstruction-wise. To prove their point they did not change the name of the Kabul children and women’s hospital that was named after Indira Gandhi. When the matter was brought to the notice of the then IB chief Arun Bhagat, he took a bit of a thanedaar’s approach when he said it was not for the IB to get into. The normal procedure in such extraordinary reach-out attempt would have been to obtain a brief from the political bosses and take it forward. Bhagat never had a stint in an intelligence agency when he was plonked on top of the IB. Wonder what Murphy’s law covers this.
In page 241 of Call to Honour, Jaswant details how an attempt was made to get in touch with Mullah Omar, through Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban foreign minister at the time of the Kandahar hijacking. When Vivek Katju from the MEA called Muttawakil on satellite phone, he responded: “Yes, why not? I am going to make contact.” Wonder why that meeting never took place?
Let’s blame it on Murphy’s Law of missed opportunities.
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com
The writer is the Executive Editor of The New Indian Express and author of Anatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq were Freed