A comedy of errors

IT WAS NOT just the 52 on board flight CD- 7444 but the whole nation that was held captive, for a few agonising hours, to an infantile hoax. It is truly astonishing that something as simple as a mischievous anonymous call claiming that the Alliance Air flight from Mumbai to Delhi had been hijacked could have triggered off a giddy chain of dramatic events which kept the Prime Minister awake and ended only after the Union Home Minister spoke directly to the pilot. What does the comedy of errors which took place in the early hours of Thursday illustrate? The Civil Aviation Minister, Mr. Shahnawaz Hussain, has chosen to put a wholly unconvincing spin on what transpired by suggesting that the drama actually demonstrated that the Government's contingency plan worked as it was able to stop the plane with a fuel truck and storm it successfully. This is laughable. One can hardly applaud the country's security apparatus for stopping and storming an aircraft that was never hijacked in the first place.

What the story of the hijack that never was reveals is that of an administration on edge. Clearly, the clouds of apprehension generated by the World Trade Center/Pentagon terrorist strikes have hung heavily on it. Unfortunately, rather than a display of alertness, what we saw in the wee hours of Thursday was a show of pitiful alarm. Anxiety got the better of reason, panic erased almost all signs of composure. Some of the details of what exactly happened on board the Mumbai-Delhi flight remain to be ascertained. These will be necessary to determine exactly where and how the blame for this tragi-comedy, which sent relatives and friends of passengers into a fright, should be apportioned. In determining exactly what transpired, the inquiry ordered into the event should provide lessons which prevent such farcical events from recurring.

However, we know a few things about Thursday's comedy of errors. For instance, we know that the panic which gripped the administration induced it to behave in a manner which - not to mince any words - totally fails to inspire trust. What satisfactory defence can Mr. Shahnawaz Hussain have for publicly declaring that the aircraft was hijacked when he was not in full possession of the facts? What justification can the Civil Aviation Secretary advance for telling the press - on the basis of extremely thin evidence - that there were two hijackers on board, neither of whom spoke ``good English''? Ironically, all the while television channels were interviewing passengers on board the `hijacked' craft via cellular phones only to be told that everything on board was calm and normal.

To brush off the drama as a result of ``miscommunication'' or a ``false alarm'' detracts attention from the seriousness of what transpired, the significance of which lies in the fact that a simple hoax fooled so many people and for so many hours. Perhaps, about the only thing worth taking positive note of is the fact that a quick decision was taken to immobilise the aircraft after it landed in New Delhi. It was exactly this that the Crisis Management Group failed to do during the infamous hijack of IC 814 a couple of years ago. It dawdled as the plane was parked in Amritsar, thereby allowing the hijackers to fly out of Indian airspace and eventually land at Kandahar, where they forced the Indian Government to swallow its pride and finally coerced it into releasing three dreaded terrorists in exchange for the passengers. At Kandahar, the Indian Government was shown up as weak and helpless by a hijack that should never have been. In New Delhi, the country's security apparatus was shown up as confused and flustered by a hijack that never was.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Next     : Politics sans values