Great relief but a heavy price

THERE IS A widespread sense of relief and rejoicing that there is finally a safe homecoming for the some 150 Indian citizens and the several foreign nationals who were trapped in a gruesome seven-day ordeal aboard the Indian Airlines flight hijacked last Friday en route from Kathmandu to New Delhi. By all accounts, the nightmare on board the hijacked Flight IC-814 was one of the most traumatic experiences faced in plane hijacks in the recent past. The cold-blooded murder of a young man, Rupin Katyal, returning from a honeymoon in Nepal, whose only mistake was apparently to glance up at his captors and was consequently viciously stabbed, places this particular hijacking in the category of the most brutal kind. The other passengers who apparently sat traumatised and terrified in their seats through the grim week, did not have it any easier. Blindfolded initially and asked to look downwards most of the time, they were starved of food for a full 24 hours at one point because of the hijackers' pique. It was clear that the group of deranged desperados who showed very little compassion even for the children who were trapped aboard and who did not waver even for a second from their emphatic demand for the release of a bunch of terrorists jailed in India, had planned their chilling strategy down to the last detail.

The deal that the Government was finally forced to agree to - the release of the Harkat-ul-Mujahadeen cleric, Maulana Masood Azhar, two other militants, Ahmed Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar - which came after five days of hard negotiations in Kandahar between Indian negotiators, the Taliban regime and the hijackers is certainly a bitter pill for the country to swallow. Yet it was a Hobson's choice, given the fact that more than a hundred innocent lives were at stake and could not on any account be traded in for the continued captivity of a few militants, however dreaded they were and however ominous their release was in terms of the impact it would have on the battle against cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. As the chilling story of the last seven days reveals, the country had a gun pointed at its head by a group of criminals. The hijackers managed to browbeat the Government of India, virtually spiriting the aircraft away from Amritsar where it had landed for at least a full 40 minutes, adroitly avoiding any stalling action at Lahore or Dubai and finally forcing the plane to land in Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban, thus virtually placing more than a hundred Indian lives at the mercy of a fundamentalist regime that has no diplomatic relations with India.

In retrospect, without taking away from the wholesomeness of the happiness that is attendant in the liberation of these traumatised hostages, the painful reality is that the Government's strategy and tactics in this period demonstrably foundered. It does appear that the Government's inability to rescue the hostages without inviting this costly trade-off, even as the hijackers are apparently walking off scotfree into the welcoming arms of their Taliban hosts, has extracted a heavy political cost and could damage India's prestige internationally. At every stage in this sordid affair, the Government seems to have squandered some crucial bargaining space and time, while investing far too much hope in the Taliban's professions of good faith. To briefly recount here the points at which it was clear that the Government's options narrowed sharply: the first fatal blunder was the failure to utilise the hijackers forced landing at Amritsar, after being denied permission to land in Lahore. There was no attempt to storm the plane or at least stall its take-off by engaging the hijackers in some sort of tactically- dictated parleys. Thus the country's vulnerability to this criminal operation and its strategic implications, intensified to the point that it no longer had control over its own decisions in respect of the hijacking, when the hijackers triumphantly took the plane out of Indian skies to unfriendlier destinations. The second mistake was the failure to persuade authorities at Dubai to try to stall the aircraft's departure by rushing a negotiating team there. The third and fatal flaw in the Government's strategic response manifested in the approach to the negotiations in Kandahar.

The strong connections between the Afghan fundamentalist militia represented in the Taliban regime and the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups operating with considerable assistance from Pakistan, have been established and therefore should not have been underestimated. It is also well known that the dangerous dimensions acquired by the insurgency in the Kashmir Valley were the consequence of the infiltration across the border of hardcore mercenaries and militants with strong Afghan connections. Thus when the aircraft landed in Kandahar on Saturday morning after its hijacking, the Government was obviously nonplussed. Yet two critical days were wasted in pondering over the diplomatic implications of what was an unavoidable engagement with the Taliban regime. The public anger that erupted in this country at the delay in bringing the nightmare to an end, particularly fuelled by the agony of the relatives of the hostage passengers, was a result of the perception that the Government was more concerned with the implications of the negotiations for India's diplomacy. The negotiations began only on Monday, three days after the passengers had begun their nightmarish ordeal.

Another worrying indication that the Government did not seem to have a credible strategy to deal with this situation was that there was no evidence of a persistent effort to persuade the Taliban to allow a commando operation to free the hostages. In hindsight, it would seem that too much faith was placed in the Taliban which ultimately proved to be conniving with the hijackers to step up the pressure on India to place the release of the terrorists as the centrepiece of any negotiation. If indeed the Taliban was a responsible state with respect for international law, it should have unhesitatingly supported an Indian action to storm the plane. Since that was not on the cards, the Government was left with no other option but to surrender to the hijackers' demands.

Amid the rejoicing, the Government and the people of India will have to absorb the sober implications and consequences of this horrendous event. First, there can be no question of ``rewarding'' the Taliban for its double-dealing in Kandahar. The hijackers and the freed terrorists have now melted into the crowd of nameless and faceless militants who wander about the Afghan countryside. Second, the military and police operations to hunt down terrorists in the Kashmir Valley would have to be intensified in the wake of the release of Maulana Azhar and his companions. But most important, the formulation of a long-term strategy to deal with militancy in the Valley, including a recognition of the need for a political approach to the aspirations of the Kashmiris, is an urgent necessity.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Next     : Security at the airports