New Delhi: On December 24, 1999, I tagged along with my colleague at The Pioneer, Ajay Singh, to meet Union home minister L.K. Advani. Newsrooms were still grappling with the fact that the IC 814 had been hijacked from Kathmandu when we heard that the flight had landed at Amritsar.
North Block wore a deserted look (it was past office time, never mind the hijack). There was no flurry of activity even outside the powerful home minister’s room. There was only Deepak Chopra, his trusted aide, present.
Yet the tension in the room was thick. Advani was pacing the room, hands behind his back, head bent, with an angry look on his face. Chopra looked glum in one corner.
After a few minutes of discussing what had happened, I summoned the courage to suggest the obvious. “Why don’t we stop the plane from taking off?” I asked. Advani frowned. “Its already taken off from Amritsar,” he said.
Although I do not recall what else was said, what I do remember was Advani’s demeanour then – of frustration and anger. I felt that it gave off the fact that he had not been part of the decision-making process.
What this little episode possibly indicates is that the home minister was not just not consulted till the time the flight took off – that he was possibly nowhere in the picture on the Day One of the crisis.
In his memoir, My Country My Life, Advani writes, “In the wake of sudden developments, the Prime Minister (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) called an emergency meeting at his residence. It was decided the first priority was to immobilise the plane at Amritsar and make it impossible for it to take off to any other destination outside the country”. Advani does not specify whether he was present at the meeting.
One of the most detailed analyses on the hijack was by Punjab supercop K.P.S. Gill on the website of the think-tank he headed, South Asia Terrorism Portal. His account paints a picture of incoherence and ineptitude, resulting in the complete bungling of India’s handling of the crisis.
Also read: IC 814: When India’s National Security Management Failed Completely
Gill says the first indication that IC-814 had been hijacked came at 4.52 pm from Air Traffic Control at Varanasi. The information was communicated to the Crisis Management Group at 4.56 pm when Captain Devi Sharan flashed the hijack code. “What the CMG actually did for the next hour is uncertain,” Gill writes. The Prime Minister was informed at 5.20 pm when he landed from Patna. He reached his residence at 5.35 pm and called a meeting of his cabinet colleagues. The CMG met shortly before 6 pm. Says Gill, “An hour had already been wasted without any action taken by the Government or any of its agencies.” Gill suggests one reason for the delay in informing the CMG probably was because the telephone numbers had not been updated!
“Throughout this period, and the next hour or so, it is unclear what the PM and the Cabinet were doing,” Gill says.
The plane finally landed at Raja Sansi Airport at 7.01 pm, two hours and nine minutes since the first information of the hijacking came. “Clear indications had also been available for 45 minutes that the pilot was aiming to land the plane at Amritsar,” Gill writes.
National Security Advisor then, Brajesh Mishra, in an interview to NDTV in 2003, had said, “So, time-wise, there was a very limited opportunity to do something. Which the critics don’t realise.” He is not clear as to whether there was a clear command given and if there was, what the instructions were.
In his minute-to-minute account of what happened, Gill makes it clear that no specific directions came from Delhi.
“Officials present at the ATC confirmed that, during the 48 minutes that the plane was at the Airport, no option to prevent its take-off was discussed by the officials at the ATC, and no specific directions were received from the superior authorities – specifically, the State CMC or the CMG at Delhi.”
But the men who were doing the talking from Delhi were the Cabinet Secretary and Brajesh Mishra.
The pilot had landed at Amritsar on the pretext that he was low on fuel. There was deliberate delay in despatching the Indian Oil bowser.
Gill writes:
“At this point it is also necessary to examine the rationale for delaying refuelling. All subsequent indications show that once the Indian Oil bowser had actually approached the plane, far more options would have been available to the ATC. The first was simply because of a fact that emerged in the media several days after the hijack, but which was known immediately to the authorities – that the airport lacked the proper ladder for refuelling an Airbus as no plane of this make currently lands at Amritsar. This in itself would have been sufficient reason in dallying over refuelling and there is no way the plane could have taken-off with the bowser connected to the plane.
“The second is that the very mechanism that allows for the refuelling of a plane also allows its “de-fuelling”, that is, the extraction of fuel from the tank. Once the bowser was in place, it could simply have dried out, and consequently immobilised, the plane.”
At around 7.25 pm Rupin Katyal was killed.
“According to one of the district authorities present at the ATC, the impression conveyed by the pilot was that the hijackers were losing their balance. These messages created an atmosphere of panic at the ATC. Contact was established with Delhi again but no clear instructions were received, the earlier instructions were repeated.”
At 7.35 pm the message from Delhi to the ATC is that an NSG team has been dispatched and the plane should be prevented from taking off. “However, it is not clarified as to how this was to be done … At 7.49 pm the plane took off surprising everyone at the Control Tower,” Gill writes.
Fixing responsibility would be “a futile exercise, since the same failures would only be repeated by someone else the next time round, when another – similar or dissimilar – crisis arises,” Gill wrote.
A still from ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’.
In the fog of propaganda the hijack story is now becoming, the only debatable point that has come out of the Netflix series is the aliases being used by the terrorists. Once the producers had fixed that problem with a new disclaimer, all else was kosher. In other words, the series, while showing the Vajpayee regime as weak – and rightfully so – makes the Modi government look far more capable by contrast.
But was there intelligence available about a possible hijack months before and were the agencies caught napping?
Thirteen years after the hijack, a letter (The Wire has a copy) dated September 27, 1999, and submitted to the Secretariat at Shillong in Meghalaya surfaced. The letter, in broken English, addressed to the chief secretary, clearly talks of the possibility of an Indian Airlines plane being hijacked from Kathmandu in the next three months. The letter says that the Army had arrested some Pakistani personnel in Jammu and Kashmir and there was an ‘attempt to set them free’.
It said:
“The persons planning to hijack an Indian plane from Kathmandu (Nepal) and now in trial to make the plan a success within 2/3 months (sic).”
When the letter resurfaced in 2012, file notings from an officer of the northeast desk suggested the issues raised are “very serious. May be forwarded to the Intelligence Bureau for comments and also state government”. A sealed cover note was also filed with the Delhi high court since a writ petition had been filed. Beyond that, nothing was heard on this. “We did conduct an inquiry and so did the Meghalaya police but could not establish much,” admits a retired official. An acquaintance of the person who wrote the 1999 letter had produced the duplicate copy of it – received from the secretariat with the original seal and stamp – to this reporter.
The debriefing of the crew of the IC 814 that took place in Delhi on their return from Kandahar also threw up some very startling details.
“The plane had been hijacked using a dagger and two grenades. Although this was confirmed by the terrorist caught by Mumbai Police, the grenades were never shown openly inside the aircraft. They were covered with a cloth,” says a retired official. The dagger and grenades were smuggled into Tribhuvan airport by Ibrahim Athar alias ‘Chief’.
“Security at Tribhuvan Airport was always weak. There was no physical frisking at the airport and Athar took advantage of this. He landed at the airport at 11.30 am for a flight that was to take off at 4.30 pm. He passed through the door frame metal detectors several times and even though there was a beep sound every time, Nepalese Police let him through perhaps because Athar was travelling business class and was dressed in a dapper suit. There weren’t many flights at that hour and anyway, everyone was in a holiday mood,” says the retired security officer who was part of the investigations that followed.
Once in, Athar used the free telephone service from inside the security hold to call the hotel at Thamel where his associates were waiting. They breezed through the airport two at a time, the official told The Wire. Athar was chosen in a draw of lots between the five terrorists who met at Kathmandu Zoo. At Amritsar, the dagger was used effectively. Passenger Rupin Katyal was killed with it. The terrorists also held this dagger to the neck of Pilot Devi Sharan’s co-pilot, causing Sharan to decide to take off as told and without refuelling.
At Lahore, Sharan told security officials that he was planning to land the aircraft in an open field guided by the colourful lights of a wedding procession that was passing by. Perhaps sensing the pilot’s desperation and not wanting the mission to be jeopardised, the terrorists managed to convey the situation to Islamabad and the lights of the Lahore airport tarmac were switched on, just in time.
On December 18, 1999, the Indian establishment had flagged unusual activity of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in Kathmandu and elsewhere in Nepal and an officer had travelled there to brief the top brass of the Nepal Police. In January, the same officer was once again in Kathmandu, this time as part of the investigation into the hijacking. A Nepal Police officer told him, “But sir when you briefed us you did not tell us about the hijack that had been planned.”
