Hotel, India, Juliet Five!

From a purely cynical point of view, nothing can generate instantly saleable literature as much as a real-life hijacking. It has all the ingredients of a readymade potboiler: knife-edge suspense, human interest, drama, international diplomatic crises, intrigue in high pla-ces... who could ask for more? So in these days of instant publishing it was inevitable that the commande-ering of Indian Airlines' flight IC 814 on Christmas Eve last year wou-ld produce its own flurry of quickies, like the book under review.

This is the "inside story" as told by Anil K Jaggia, who was flight engineer on that fateful flight from Kathmandu, one of the three-man team in the cockpit, and written up by Indian Express investigative journalist Shaurabh Shukla. Short of an account by the commander of IC 814 Captain Devi Sharan _ who's version is expected to be published by Penguin later this year_ that's about as close to the horse's mouth as you can get. But for all that, and in a strange way, the book suffers from its immediacy.

 

Since Jaggia's experience is necessarily sparse _ after all, he can only tell us what the hijackers said and did and what happened inside the aircraft, which can hardly fill a book _ Shukla has interspersed his account with the developments in Delhi and in Kandahar. This is an intelligent way to go about things, especially given the kind of deadlines that the writing of this book must have demanded.

Yet, published just three months after the crisis and in these days of micro- media coverage _ this was one thing l'affaire IC 814 never lacked _ the book leaves the reader asking: what's new? In the end, the same issues and questions about who the hijackers really were, India's bungling at Amritsar (indeed, all through), the negotiations with the Taliban and Pakistan's intransigence remain.

To be sure, Shukla has been admirably painstaking in piecing together the sequence of events and Jaggia has provided plenty of interesting detail to fill the gaps where the TV cameras could not intrude. For instance, you get to know that Sharan had alerted ground control at Amritsar with the coded message "Hotel, India, Juliet (HIJ), five" indicated that there were five hijackers on board. In fact, you begin to understand just how badly the government botched things up when Sharan risked everything to bluff the hijackers and landed in Amritsar instead of Lahore.

Even so, the narrative doesn't really go beyond rehashing much of the coverage that has appeared on TV and in magazines. It does not, therefore, rise above a lengthy and conscientious piece of reportage.

It is possible that a reader's perspective would change if he were to read the book, say, a year or two down the line. Public memory is notoriously short, so there's value in recounting the events in sequence with a bit of drama thrown in. But here too, the book falls short of expectation. Jaggia's account, for instance, is uni-dimensional and somewhere in the telling, the human element is missing. There were three people in that cockpit, but you never get to know what Commander Sharan and his co-pilot Rajinder Kumar really thought or felt. Then again, Jaggia spent eight days in close proximity to the hijackers. It is probably a shortcoming of the author's writing skills that their personalities never really move beyond the realm of cardboard figures of unrelieving menace.

The hijacking of flight IC 814 raises many questions and Shukla's account suggests that there are plenty of leads that are well worth following up, not least the connection between the hijackers and a criminal group in Mumbai. From the reader's point of view it would probably have been a more fruitful exercise if the publishers had exercised a bit of patience and commissioned a book based on an independent investigation of some of these issues. Of course, that would have meant waiting at least a year if not more, by which time the media would have made sure that the tragedy of IC 814 had been lost in the vicarious excitements of other catastrophes.