To what extent can issues of national security become hostage to partisan politics? This is the question that has come to the fore in the rea-ctions to the new book Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years by A.S. Dulat, former chief of the spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). Mr Dulat was the R&AW chief in 1999, when the hijacking of flight IC-814 took place. He has contended that there was a “goof up” in our handling of the crisis. The Congress Party has seized upon this reve-lation to castigate the then leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, and in particular the “policy paralysis” that resulted because of a difference of approach between deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The BJP has reacted predictably, dis-missing Mr Dulat’s book as a retired bureaucrat’s attempt at catching the limelight, and wonde-ring why an event that happened 16 years ago should be discussed at all. The Congress, it says, is making political capital out of the new book when in reality it was party to the decision to do whatever is possible to save the lives of the passengers who were held hostage.
Indian Airlines flight IC-814 took off from Kathmandu for New Delhi on December 24, 1999, at 4.53 pm. Within minutes it was hijacked by five Pakistanis led by Ibrahim Athar, brother of Masood Azhar, one of the most violent and brutal leaders of the terrorist organisations Harkat-ul-Ansar and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Delhi was informed of the hijacking at 4.56 pm. At 7 pm the plane landed at Amritsar. Apparently, authorities at the airport had instructions not to let the plane take off, but it managed to do so and reached Lahore in Pakistan, where it was refuelled. At 10.30 pm the plane left Lahore and the pilot was asked to fly to Kabul. However, since Kabul airport did not have night landing facilities, the plane landed in Dubai at 1.32 am on December 25. On December 26 morning, it took off from Dubai and landed shortly thereafter at Kandahar, in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It remained there until the evening of December 31, when the hijacking ended with the release by the Government of India of three dangerous terrorists — Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Omar Sheikh and the dreaded Masood Azhar — who were escorted to Kandahar in an Indian plane by foreign minister Jaswant Singh himself. The lives of all the passengers, save one, the young and newly married Rupin Katyal, whose throat was slit, were secured. The Taliban released the hijackers, who returned to Pakistan to continue the business of killing Indians.
It is important to recall these facts because for an entire generation of the young these are too old to recall. The question that has raised a lot of political heat is whether there was a “goof up” in the manner in which we handled the hijacking. To my mind, there is little doubt that after the hijacked plane fortuitously landed in Amritsar our response was both weak and ineffective, thus allowing the plane to leave for Lahore. This inference is not meant to stoke partisan political responses. It is meant for us, as a nation, to take stock of our security responses, and to analyse what went wrong objectively, so that we are better prepared next time, God forbid, there is a crisis of this nature.
It is easy, of course, to be judgmental in hindsight, but even a sympathetic observer like former foreign secretary and national security adviser J.N. Dixit — who thought that generally the government acted as well as it could — feels that “some conclusions are inescapable”. In his book, India-Pakistan in War and Peace, published in 2002, he writes: “There was a lack of coordination in terms of speed and time between the authorities at Delhi and Amritsar. The runway was not blocked immediately after the landing of the plane in Amritsar. The NSG (National Security Guard) commandos did not scramble into their action/operation mode with sufficient speed. The hijackers had enough time to take off without facing any effective resistance.”
Much of the above is vouched for by Mr Dulat’s account. The instructions from Delhi were neither unambiguous nor emphatic. The director-general police of Punjab did not want to take any action on his own account. Confusion prevailed. The hijackers could not believe their unexpected good fortune. An argument has been made, and not without justification, that the safety of the hostages was a major constraining factor in delaying decisive action. However, the opposite is probably true. Preventing the plane from taking off again would have given time to negotiate with the hijackers. Besides, there was no guarantee that should the plane be allowed to leave the safety of the hostages would be guaranteed. The strategically correct thing was to buy time and block the runway immediately and make contact with the hijackers to negotiate the safe release of the passengers.
Any other country with effective and quick security responses would have capitalised on the incredible stroke of good luck that led the hijacked plane to land at an airport within its own boundaries. This is the plain truth, and to accept it with honesty should be seen not as a game of political one-upmanship, but to encourage an objective appraisal of what transpired so that the right lessons can be drawn for the future.
Mr Dulat’s account, belated as it is, should be best seen in this context. The reality is that irrespective of which political party is in power, our intelligence and security preparedness are still far below par, and even now very little is being done to rectify this sorry state of affairs.
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma is a Rajya Sabha member
