The current debate is wrong. The focus should be on why the plane was allowed to leave Amritsar.

The hijacking of IC 814 should hurt us less because of what Pakistan and its proxies managed to do than because of the way New Delhi fundamentally mishandled the incident.

Instead of preventing the plane from taking off from Amritsar, the government at the time failed to order the plane to be immobilized on the runway during refueling.

Two senior ministers have publicly stated that, ironically, this was the government’s priority. Jaswant Singh, the foreign minister who later scandalously accompanied terrorists personally on board his plane to Kandahar, documents his frustrations in his bookA Call to Honor: Serving Emerging India(Page 237) “Take your damn fingers out immediately. For God’s sake, do something, don’t let the damn plane leave Amritsar!”

His senior cabinet colleague Lal Kishan Advani, the Sardar Patel wannabe of those days and Bharat Ratna award winner, wrote in his memoirs: My country, my life (p. 621): “Due to the sudden developments, the Prime Minister called an emergency meeting at his residence. It was decided that the first priority would be to paralyse the aircraft at Amritsar and make it impossible for it to take off to any other destination outside the country.”

So what went wrong?

The then RAW chief AS Dulat, who had been hit by both the Kargil and IC-814 fiascos, told a reporter: “I must say, we messed it up!”

KPS Gill blamed Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, who was in charge of the crisis management team that oversaw the hijacking, which took place as soon as the plane entered Indian airspace on Christmas Eve in December 1999. But the blame goes further.

The story is broadly this: The air traffic controller in Delhi knew at about 4:40 p.m. that IC 814 had been hijacked from Kathmandu and was flying northwest. Given the fuel situation, security planners knew the hijackers had four options: Amritsar, Mumbai, Ahmedabad or militarized Jammu.

So there was time to prepare for eventualities, as Jaswant Singh and LK Advani put it. At around 6 p.m., Amritsar air traffic control knew the plane was coming their way. IC 814 landed 40 minutes later. It remained on the tarmac for another 40 minutes waiting for fuel.

Unfortunately, there was no anti-hijack force in Amritsar at the time; they were stationed in Manesar, Haryana, about 490 km away. There was no communication link with the hijackers. New Delhi had no idea how many hijackers there were. On board was a RAW officer, Sashi Bhushan Tomar, then First Secretary of the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu, who was allegedly related by marriage to a senior official, but this is not relevant. It was not known what kind of weapons the hijackers had and how many.

The standard procedure in case of a hijacking is to stop the aircraft. When IC 814 landed in Amritsar, the CMG was still discussing whether the plane should be stopped. There was no discussion How to stop. Consequently, no orders were given in this regard. The then Punjab Police Commissioner scandalously claimed that he had learned about the hijacking from television, although the instructions to him were to stop the plane at all costs.

No benevolent view

It is clear that no such decision was made, even though the plane took off at 7:40 p.m. or so, after waiting patiently like a duck on the tarmac, even though there was a clear three-hour window for the decision to be made. This cannot be looked upon favorably.

Worse still, after Rupin Katyal’s throat was slit and his body was dumped on the tarmac of Al Minhad military airport, the plane was finally allowed to land in Kandahar, where the Taliban acted as a front for the ISI and negotiated the release of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. And Jaswant Singh volunteered to personally hand them over to the hijackers in Kandahar, wrapped in gift paper and decorated with bows.

As we all know, Omar later slit the throats of Daniel Pearl and Masood Azhar, married in Pakistan and in return founded Jaish e Mohammed, which orchestrated the attack on our Parliament two years later.

The current debate is a hoax

The current debate about IC 814 is a bit misguided. Let’s face it: a terrorist is a terrorist, no matter what his alleged name is. The questions we should really be asking are: how could the government of the day allow IC 814 to take off from Amritsar? Should the government have allowed the exchange of the three terrorists? And finally, couldn’t they have been given a slow-acting poison before they were released when it was clear that these three were on the terrorists’ long list of demands? It’s fine to take out the bad guys in Pakistan, but sometimes such charity starts at home.