State Of The Art

Indian carriers should invariably follow their own security drill meticulously so as to make up for an airport's lapses

The initial response of the government of India to the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu showed all the symptoms of an entity unprepared and unable to handle a crisis when it suddenly descends upon it. With hindsight, by far the greatest damage seems to have been done by allowing the plane to depart from Indian soil when it took off from Amritsar for Lahore. Had this not happened, the Indian authorities would have been able to negotiate with the hijackers on Indian soil and wear down their patience in territory which is hostile to them. Instead, Indian negotiators thereafter had no choice but to talk to the hijackers in what was to them the safe heaven of Kandahar in Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Among those who have been appalled by the government's ability to be outmanoeuvred is K P S Gill, super cop and tamer of Punjab terrorists, who has two successful negotiations with hijackers to his credit. He has said that, if need be, the plane should have been physically prevented from taking off from Amritsar as otherwise the balance would have decisively tilted in favour of the hijackers, as it indeed did. As to what the government would have done if disallowing the plane from taking off endangered the lives of the hostages, Mr Gill's answer was that what the government had done instead had, if anything, worsened the security of the hostages.

It will be some time before the full facts are known and under what extenuating circumstances the government acted the way it did, but a key incontrovertible fact is that the bird had flown the coop even before the response could get going. The Rapid Action Force commandos with a sole negotiator were still in the air, on the way to Amritsar, when the hijacked plane took off from Indian soil. Thus the hijackers could get over their initial disadvantage stemming from an appaprent lack of planning, thanks to the Indian government's inability to come up with a quick and decisive response. As the clock ticked by with the hope aroused by the release of 27 passengers on Saturday slowly fading away in the absence of subsequent action, the sinking feeling was that the Indian authorities could only react, not get into action sufficiently quickly to snatch away the advantage from the enemy. The same halting, bumbling initial reaction marked the conduct of the Kargil war which at first found India hopelessly outmanoeuvred.

The slipups have not of course been solely that of the government. Indian Airlines apparently issued the boarding cards to several hijackers while knowing and noting the name of only one passenger-hijacker. As several Indian Airlines planes have been hijacked by now and because Kashmir makes entire South Asia a high security risk area, Indian carriers should invariably follow their own security drill meticulously so as to make up for an airport's lapses. In this they can take a leaf out of the book of the Israeli carrier El Al which managed to live with Palestinian terrorism for decades. India's rulers have to put in place procedures and mechanisms which produce an instantaneous response to crises, be they manmade or natural, so that they can live down the reputation acquired since the Kargil war of being laid back and in the face of a crisis, initially only able to react to events.