Kandahar episode

My Country My Life

(memoirs of L K Advani)

Phase Five (1997-2007) CROSS-BORDER TERRORISM : A Pak-Jihadi Challenge and Our Response

(excerpts)
It was 24 December 1999. I was in my North Block offi ce on that rather cold Friday afternoon. As it always happens at this time, the country was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new year. But there was a keener edge to this expectancy now. In a week it would be not just the new year, but also a new century and a new millennium. The following day was Christmas and also Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s seventy-fi fth birthday. The turbulent year was at its fag end. Atalji’s bus yatra to Lahore, our government’s fall by a solitary vote, a war in Kargil due to Pakistan’s betrayal, mid-term elections and a renewed mandate-this was more than enough to make the year eventful, and all of us in the government looked forward to a period of quietude.

THE HIJACKING OF INDIAN AIRLINES FLIGHT IC 814

The news that actually terrified the nation, and added further turbulence to the outgoing year, was the one I received as I was leafi ng through some offi cial papers on Christmas Eve. Slightly before 5 pm, Shyamal Dutta, Director, IB, phoned me to say, ‘Sir, an Indian Airlines plane coming from Nepal has been hijacked.’ I was stunned by what I heard. ‘How many passengers are there on the fl ight?’ I asked. ‘More than 160,’ he said. The Delhi-bound IC 814, which had taken off from Kathmandu, was hijacked by fi ve armed men who ordered the pilot to fl y to Lahore. When the airport authorities in Lahore refused landing permission, the aircraft landed in Amritsar where the hijackers demanded that it be refuelled.
In the wake of the sudden developments, the Prime Minister called an emergency meeting at his residence. It was decided that our first priority would be to immobilise the plane at Amritsar and make it impossible for it to take off to any other destination outside the country. The Crisis Management Group (CMG), chaired by Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, was immediately activated to dispatch the message to the police authorities in Punjab. The CMG decided to send a fuel bowser to the aircraft, carrying commandos who would defl ate its tyres. Unfortunately, minutes before it could reach the plane, the hijackers ordered the captain to take off. Its next stop, with just enough fuel for the trip, was Lahore, where Pakistani authorities not only refuelled the aircraft but also refused our request to prevent it from taking off. The hijackers then commandeered IC 814 to a military airbase near Dubai. There, they dumped the body of one of the passengers they had killed, Rupin Katyal, and released twenty-eight others. They asked the pilot to fl y the aircraft, with 161 hostages on board, to Kandahar* in southern Afghanistan, which was then under Taliban rule.
* Kandahar was the capital of an ancient Hindu kingdom. Its princess Gandhari was married to Dhritarashtra, uncle of the Pandava brothers in the epic Mahabharata. Under Kanishka, the legendary Kushana emperor, Buddhism fl ourished in Afghanistan. Bamiyan Buddha, the tallest single-rock carving of Lord Buddha in the world, were created in the Kushana period. They were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban government, which also allowed the ranscacking of the famous Kabul museum, which housed priceless exhibits showing Afghanistan’s deep civilisational links with India. Until some decades ago, Kandahar had a signifi cant Hindu and Sikh population.
I spent the entire night at the CMG’s office at Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan, where Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Advisor, and other officials were also present, closely monitoring the developments and revising the strategy to secure the release of the hostages in the fast-changing scenario…. We soon learnt that the hijackers had been demanding the release of thirty-six terrorists from Indian jails, besides a ransom of US $200 million. But their main demand was for the release of Mohammad Masood Azhar, leader of one of the most dreaded terrorist organisations in Jammu & Kashmir, who had been arrested in 1994. The CCS decided to send a team of three offi cials-Ajit Doval, a senior offi cer in the IB known for handling tough operations, Vivek Katju, a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, and C.D. Sahay from the RAW-to Kandahar to negotiate with the hijackers as well as the Taliban authorities.
I was initially not in favour of exchanging the terrorists with the hostages. However, the situation that our government was faced with was truly extraordinary. The fact that the hijackers had taken the plane to Kandahar had rendered the situation much more complex and difficult. Usually, in such a situation, the captors are at least as much under pressure as the government of the country whose plane has been held captive, to conclude the negotiations quickly and strike a bargain. In this case, however, the hijackers were under no pressure at all and were prepared to prolong the period of captivity since they had three advantages. Firstly, they were in a hospitable territory-Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, with which India had no diplomatic relations, and they showed no signs of putting any pressure on them to end the hijack or leave the country. Secondly, we had credible information that every move of the hostagetakers was being masterminded by the ISI in Pakistan. Since the Taliban was a creation of the ISI, Pakistan had control over not only the plane, but also the airport. The Indian government had the option of sending its airborne commandos and troops to Kandahar in an attempt to rescue the hostages, but we received information that the Taliban authorities, under instruction from Islamabad, had ringed the airport area with tanks. Our commanders could have disarmed the hijackers inside the plane. However, outside the plane, an armed conflict with Taliban forces would have endangered the very lives that needed rescue.
There was another risk. Even the rescue planes would have had to fl y over Pakistan’s airspace, the permission for which would have certainly been denied. We also had credible information, which was corroborated by the subsequent fi ndings on the hijacked aircraft, that the hijackers were carrying grenades and explosives and were ready to blow up the plane. One of them had been heard saying that this ammunition was going to be used as a ‘millennium present for the government of India’, a spectacular terrorist act on New Year’s Day.
Thirdly, and the most unfortunate part of the entire episode, pressure was being mounted on the Indian government to ‘somehow’ save the lives of the hostages. As the crisis entered its third day, hysterical demonstrations by the relatives of some of the hostages were staged in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, and I regret to say that these were at least partly instigated by the BJP’s political adversaries. Some television channels chose to hype up these protests with round-the-clock publicity, creating an impression that the government was doing ‘nothing’ when the lives of so many Indians were at stake. All this made me wonder: ‘It used to be said that the Indian State is a soft state, but has Indian society also become a soft society?’ However, it was somewhat reassuring to see that these televised protests led the relatives of Kargil martyrs to urge the families of the hostages to be patient.
With mounting pressure from relatives on one hand, and the possibility of hijackers taking recourse to some desperate action on the other, the government most reluctantly took the option of minimising the losses. Three jailed terrorists, including Masood Azhar, were released on 31 December and handed over to the Taliban authorities in Kandahar. Our negotiating team in Kandahar bargained hard and was able to bring down the demand of release of thirty-six persons in jail to just three. All the passengers and crew members of IC 814 were released and returned to Delhi the same night. Thus ended a crisis, which presented to the world, a new face of warfare; a small group of ready-to-die terrorists challenging a country with a large standing army.
Throughout the hijack episode, my colleague Jaswant Singh, and his colleagues in the MEA, worked tirelessly to bring the crisis to a satisfactory end. As for the hijackers, escorted by their ISI mentors, they headed back to the country that had sponsored their heinous act. Indeed, a few days after his release, this is what Masood Azhar had to say to a cheering crowd in a mosque in Karachi: ‘I have come here because it is my duty to tell you that Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India.’
The security forces pursuing the trail of Pakistan’s Operation Hijack have made a significant breakthrough. Working in tandem with central intelligence agencies, the Mumbai Police have nabbed four ISI operatives, who comprised the support cell for the fi ve hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane. All these four are activists of the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), a fundamentalist tanzeem based in Rawalpindi (Pakistan), which in 1997 was declared by USA as a terrorist organisation. After this declaration, the tanzeem has rechristened itself as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM). Interrogation of these four operatives has confi rmed that the hijack was an ISI operation executed with the assistance of Harkat-ul-Ansar, and further, that all the five hijackers are Pakistanis.
As if to endorse the information I had given in Parliament, Pakistani media reported on the same day that the released terrorists had surfaced in Karachi. Thus, it was obvious that the hijack crisis was part of Pakistan’s continuing proxy war against India. Credible evidence has subsequently surfaced to suggest that the terrorists and their patrons linked to the hijack of IC 814 were also associated with the conspiracy that resulted in 9/11.
http://www.mycountrymylife.com/excerpts/phase-5.html#cross

‘Advani didn’t want terrorists freed...

April 24, 2009, Indian Express
Darjeeling: Darjeeling: JASWANT ON IC-814: ‘Shourie objected...intense debate in Cabinet...Farooq opposed too’
L K Advani and Arun Shourie were the two NDA Ministers who opposed the decision to free terrorists in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight in 1999.
Saying he was “sharing this for the first time,” Jaswant Singh, the then External Affairs Minister who accompanied three terrorists to Kandahar, told The Indian Express in a recorded interview here today that on Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s saying, he went to Advani to explain “why it (freeing the terrorists) should be done.”
“I will tell you who were opposed. I have not spoken it ever. I am sharing this for the first time,” said Singh, who is contesting the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat backed by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha.
“Two members in the Vajpayee Cabinet were opposed to the idea of release of any terrorist in exchange for hijacked Indian Airlines passengers and pay any price. Shri Lal Krishna Advaniji and Mr Arun Shourie voiced their views against...that this should not be done. And I am sharing this for the first time.
“Hearing of Lalji Advani’s reservations, the then Prime Minister Vajpayeeji told me that I should go personally and explain everything to Lalji. I remember I went and told Lalji why it should be done. I do not exactly remember what effort was taken to explain things to Mr Arun Shourie.
“L K Advani, like a loyal and devoted party member, responded and referred to the collective wishes of the Cabinet. Lalji also suggested that the consent of the Chief Minister of the state concerned, J & K, should be sought and his views be heard. Farooq Abdullah was consulted. He did object to the release of terrorists. Fine, he had a reservation. Reservations about release of certain terrorists like Masood Azhar and two others. His reservations were taken into account. Later, L K Advani also reasoned with him.
“It was not as if the Cabinet (did not) discuss (the issue). Decisions were taken in a hurry but only after prolonged and intense discussion. Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Cabinet was the most democratic Cabinet in which decisions were taken after full discussions.”
The three terrorists who were released were Maulana Masood Azhar, who later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammad; Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Omar Saeed Sheikh, convicted for the killing of US journalist Daniel Pearl.
Singh’s remarks come when the Kandahar exchange has been raised by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul to counter Advani’s charge that Singh is the “weakest Prime Minister.”
His remarks also assume significance given that in an interview to Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express, on NDTV’s Walk the Talk in March last year, Advani had said that he “did not know” about Jaswant Singh going to Kandahar until “he was going.”
In that interview, Advani did admit that he “was not happy with the decision (to free the terrorists).”

Asked why did Jaswant Singh have to go, Advani had said: “He was not escorting them, he was trying to bring back the passengers being held hostage. But I don’t think I’m answerable for that. If the Cabinet Committee on Security had taken the decision, I would have been answerable, but it did not.”
Singh also slammed the Congress for raising the issue in the manner in which it has done. “After the hijack of the Indian Airlines flight with 166 passengers on board, members of the Congress party were encouraged to organize rallies and protests and to roll in the streets outside the Prime Minister’s residence demanding the release of the hijacked passengers.”
Singh said that in a meeting, the Opposition was of the “categorical” view “that the government must find a solution to the problem and while looking for a solution, safety of the 166 hijacked passengers should be the government’s prime concern...Beyond a certain point, Opposition parties to the NDA are trying to make a political issue out of potential national wrongs of great dimensions.”
To underline this point, Singh said: “Again, I will repeat, I for example, do not keep harping on the abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, of Charar-e-Sharif or Hazratbal or numerous such instances, it is because I know the government will continue to face such challenges. Any government might face these situations in future. Decisions would have to be taken by the government of the day, then and there. One of the most difficult things is to decide between two great wrongs. Wrongs to release three wanted terrorists; wrongs to let a total of 166 hijacked passengers die.
“There is one more lesson to be in this. The criminal law justice system. All the three terrorists released were in custody for three years to eight years. I am not going to ask what the previous governments were doing about this because I know the reality of the sluggishness of the system. That’s why I appeal to all to reflect on the challenges we face on a continuing basis. All judgment is retrospective, where the vision is 20-20. And a government in power has to act on the instant. We did not have the leisure of 20-20 vision then.”

Jaswant Singh's version of the Kandahar hijack
July 21, 2006 Rediff
Former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh's book A Call to Honour has taken Delhi by storm. Though the formal release of the controversial book is slated for July 27 in New Delhi, copies that hit the market on Friday flew off the shelves as readers wanted to know what he had written about the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight to Kandahar in December 1999.
Television channels and the print media have been focussing on Jaswant Singh's comments in his book. The Congress party has alleged that Jaswant Singh carried $120 million (about Rs 540 crores) along with three dreaded terrorists -- Maulana Masood Azhar, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Omar Ahmed Saeed Sheikh, on the plane to Kandahar to secure the release of 161 passengers and crew on IC-814.
Jaswant Singh claims he had to ponder a great deal while writing about this most difficult time in the six-year National Democratic Alliance government's life.
'Before writing about this event, I reflected long on how I was to do it; how would I convey the enormity of the challenge that was we faced, as a nation and not simply as a government,' he writes in the chapter titled 'Troubled Neighbour, Turbulent Times: 1999'.
He refers to the notes that he made during the journey from Delhi to Lahore and what went through his mind. 'It is impossible not to jot down impressions on board this special flight. I do not really know what to term my mission -- a rescue mission; an appeasement exercise; a flight to compromise or a flight to the future,' he writes.
Jaswant Singh reveals what went through his mind during the week-long hijack drama. His thoughts swung from one end to the other and he wanted to weigh the options before his government. 'For three terrorists, 161 men, women and children. Is it right? Wrong? A compromise? What? At first I stood against any compromise, then, slowly, as the days passed I began to change,' he wrote.
He said he had gone to Kandahar to terminate the hijacking and bring back the passengers. While he was holding talks with then Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttavakil, he ensured that all the passengers were safely transferred to the relief aircraft.
'The whole system at Kandahar was chaotic, on top of which there was the hijacked plane, the hostages, the relief aircraft and now the one on which I was. I wanted the hostages to leave. And I wanted to meet all of them again -- after they had boarded the relief aircraft,' Jaswant Singh recalled.
Sharing information about the terrorists' demands, Jaswant Singh confirms that the terrorists wanted $200 million (about Rs 900 crore) along with the release of 36 of their men.
'The day the demands of the hijackers -- $200 million as ransom money, release of some 36 proven terrorists and the interred remains of a terrorist -- came to me, I shared them with the Cabinet and sought advice. The Cabinet was unanimous -- 'Reject the demands and tell the press in appropriate words'. It was a tense day, the press waited outside and I had to brief them. I repeated the demands and simply added, "I now urge all in my country and abroad to reflect on these demands." There was really nothing else or more to say,' writes the former external affairs minister.