New Delhi: A S Dulat was the man in the middle, rather the muddle of the Hijack of IC-814 in 1999. He was the chief of RA&W – the indian external intelligence arm, and in a forthcoming book – Kashmir: The Vajpayee years, has admitted that the Crisis Managment Group at the time goofed up. It was a five hour meeting in Delhi on DEcemeber 24th, Christmas eve, that didnt decide while the plane was on the ground in Amritsar, and because of this indecision, the plane was allowed to take off and eventually land via dubai in Kandhar.
Dulat said that “no one in Delhi or Punjab wanted to bell the cat”. In the meantime, the plane flew away, and with it the opportunity to gain an upper hand over the hijackers. Later, Dulat says “everyone shifted the blame to each other”.
Speaking ahead of the launch of his book, ‘Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years’, Dulat said that the then Punjab police chief Sarabjit Singh, who was in charge of the situation when the plane was on the ground in Amritsar, said Delhi never told him that IC-814 was not to be allowed to take off. Singh did tell Delhi that he had at his disposal Punjab commandos trained in anti-terrorism operations who could storm the aircraft but Delhi’s response was that it did not want any casualties.
After the plane flew off to Lahore – the next stop was Dubai and eventually Kandahar – Dulat writes that the “CMG degenerated into a blame game…with the cabinet secretary being head of the CMG as one target and NSG chief Nikhil Kumar, another.”
The plane had been hijacked from Kathmandu and its last take-off point from India was Amritsar. The hijack drama and the plane passenger hostage crisis had lasted for seven days before India freed three militants Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar who have since been implicated in other terrorist actions, including September 9/11, kidnap and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl and November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
He has not spared the handling of the hostage trade-off in 1989 too. At the time the daughter of the then Union home minister and current J&K CM Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was kidnapped. Dulat said, “Rubaiya’s kidnapping is a classic case on how not to handle a hostage crisis. We did everything wrong. Because it was such a high-profile kidnap, every friend of Mufti appeared on the scene and was busy scoring points. So instead of releasing one militant – Hamid Sheikh – which was all the JKLF wanted, we released five.” He pointed out that the release of the four others didn’t matter as much as the psychological impact of that trade-off. “They felt that they made Delhi bend.”
Jaitley had defended the handling of the hijack:
In the run up to the national elections last year, in March 2014, BJP leader Arun Jailtey on defended Vajpayee government’s releasing the three most wanted terrorists in return for the safety of passengers of the Indian Airlines plane hijacked to Kandahar in 1999, saying the lives of all Indians were “more precious” than the release of the terrorists.
He said in reply to a question that if NDA returns to power at the Centre its government would definitely ask Pakistan to hand over those accused of the plane hijack.
The NDA has been in power for a year now, and one has yet to see them come good on that promise, especially as Jaitley is the second most powerful man in the govt and the party by all accounts.
Jaitley had also said would be no compromise with the national security.
