Hijacking or Drama?

While there will always remain an element of mystery about all hijackings, not the least during the event itself, that fog dissipates to a great extent once the hijacking is over i.e. if the stated demands remain constant with the actual motives of the hijacking. Within the first few hours of the hijacking, it was clear that there was more to the hijacking than the act itself. The way the Indian media went at Pakistan from the word go made two things very apparent, that the media was being influenced in this direction by unseen hands and that the ultimate aim of the exercise seemed to be to malign Pakistan at any cost. The defamation of Pakistan seemed to get top priority over all other issues, the safety and welfare of the hostages on the aircraft, mostly Indians, came last. Over-confident after Kargil about their ability to manipulate the truth, India managed to over-reach its own potential for disinformation as well as misinformation. With the hijackers demanding the release of Kashmiri militants, their leaning to the Kashmir freedom struggle was established, by Indian inference so was the "link to Pakistan".

The aircraft landed at three airports in three different countries before finally parking itself on the tarmac at Kandahar Airport, neither the Amritsar or Dubai take-offs were criticised but the intervening one at Lahore was castigated from pillar to post. The aircraft was allowed to leave Amritsar by the Indians but did Pakistan allow it to leave Lahore? Neither was Dubai taken to task for refuelling the aircraft and allowing it to leave. The passenger manifesto consisted mainly of Indians, only a handful from other nationalities, no Pakistanis were mentioned initially. Repeatedly confirmed by both the Indian electronic and print media, BBC and other media services also reported this. Within hours of landing at Kandahar this changed, the hijackers were declared to be "Pakistanis" by the Indians. Given that passengers even after the episode could not identify the origin, this was rather far-fetched to say the least.

The maturity of the handling of the situation by the Taliban froze the Indians into silence, for full four days they did not start hostage negotiations, part of crisis management exercise in such situations that must begin within hours, not days. Nepal has been castigated for lax security procedures, for permitting "Pakistanis to disembark from a PIA flight from Karachi and board the Indian Airlines directly on the tarmac", when this version did not gel a convenient switch was made to the more plausible theory of passengers using the "Arrivals and Immigration" facilities at Kathmandu Airport before going through "Immigration and Departure" with the help of "Boarding Cards" taken by a Nepalese, failing to justify what happened in the gap between the scheduled arrival and departure of the PIA and IA flights respectively. When the "Nepalese" among the hijackers turned out to be a legitimate businessman, the "Boarding Cards" theory became hogwash.

As for the demands of the hijackers, first it was for Maulana Masood Azhar, then it was increased to 36 militants, the dead body of a slain militant and US$ 200 million, the last two demands were dropped within hours, the Taliban labelling the ransom demand as un-Islamic. Eventually the Indians gave in to releasing three militants, Maulana Masood Azhar from Bahawalpur, Pakistan, a British student of Kashmiri origin and a hard-core Kashmiri freedom fighter.

There was something fishy and peculiar about the whole episode right from the start, the presence of an Indian Research and Analytical Wing (RAW) man on board, the First Secretary in the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu, added to the suspicion. India has been desperately trying to label Pakistan as a "terrorist state" for the past decade, trying to blur the line between a "freedom fighter" and a "terrorist" in order to choke off material and moral support for the indigenous Kashmir independence movement. With military rule in Pakistan not in line with the sensibilities of the world's democracies and there being a general apprehension about terrorism close to the turn of the millennium (the US State Department had given an official world-wide alert), the opportunity was ripe for maligning Pakistan and to convince the world that the Kashmiri struggle is not an independence movement but a terrorist one, that Pakistan provides logistics for such terrorism. Add that to the fact of Russia, which is engaged in a brutal assault on the Chechen capital, moving a resolution in the UN Security Council about the hijacking, an initiative that has never been taken before, and one gets an impression of an unholy alliance meant to divert world opinion from their very obvious problems at home.

Somehow one cannot escape the feeling that a tragedy was planned to take place on Pakistani soil so that world approbation could be brought to bear on Pakistan. The script went horribly wrong when the aircraft was made to leave Lahore. Once the aircraft was in Dubai and a drama in Lahore a la Ganga was no longer an option, the script switched to Afghanistan, already under world censure for giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden. Earlier the Indians had flashed a statement conveniently emanating from Osama bin Laden, calling the US, Russians and Indians "enemies" of Islam. Who had obtained Osama bin Laden's reaction at such short notice was left to one's imagination.

Unfortunately for the Indians the Taliban also did not follow the Bollywood script, UN sanctions notwithstanding. Instead of welcoming the hijackers with open arms and thereby stand indicted in the eyes of the world as a haven for terrorists, their reaction was that of any mature, sovereign State handling a hostage situation. This stunned the Indians into immobility; they waited for 48 to 72 hours for the Taliban to make some wrong move before realising that the game was not playing out as they wanted it to. Moreover, the reaction of the relatives of the Indian hostages on board the Airbus also spun out of control in the streets of New Delhi, the world media attention giving it a life of its own, the fallout of the wave of domestic anger threatening the ruling Indian regime. Why did it take four days for India's specialist negotiators to come into hostage negotiations with the hijackers and that also when the Taliban authorities gave a severe warning that the aircraft would be forced to leave Kandahar if the Indians did not expedite the issue? In a further manifestation of their maturity, the Taliban also unequivocally told the hijackers that even if one passenger was harmed, they would storm the aircraft.

By this time the Indians were running out of options, obviously one of them was to send in a crack commando team on board the relief aircraft to try and overcome the hijackers. But Kandahar is not Entebbe, the Indians are not Israelis and the Taliban are no pushovers, they are battle-hardened. The strengthening of the security around the aircraft ruled out such an option, the Taliban thus avoiding a stage-managed bloodbath on their soil. With the world not convinced about Pakistan's alleged involvement, with the Taliban not reacting according to the world perception about their supposed reputation and domestic pressure building up, India decided it was time to cut their losses and exercise damage control. Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh air-dashed to Kandahar with three so-called militants to exchange with the passengers. His request for a meeting was turned down by Mullah Omar, may be that is the reason for his being peevish about the Taliban on return to New Delhi, only grudgingly acknowledging their help. With the Taliban giving 10 hours to the hijackers to leave Afghanistan by road, they could conceivably go anywhere. Even though before they had left the premises of Kandahar Airport, the Indian media was confidently saying they were heading for Quetta. The hijackers would have been morons to adopt such an obvious route, they still have to surface somewhere.

Whether the hijacking was genuine or an Indian-staged drama, once the hijack was on the Indians concentrated all their energies and resources in making capital out of the event in their on-going campaign to malign Pakistan. PM Atal Behari Vajpayee finally came out with the real Indian motives when he asked the world to "declare Pakistan a terrorist state". There is irony in the fact that Vajpayee, Advani, Thakre and Company are the colleagues and soul-mates of Nathuram Godse, the terrorist who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, adjudged by TIME magazine to be, alongwith late US President F. D. Roosevelt, Jr. to be the runners-up for the "Person of the Century" behind Albert Einstein. What does one expect from them but the same venom and hatred that led their associate to kill Gandhi simply because he wanted India to live with the fait accompli of Pakistan? Till their generation passes away Pakistan can expect no respite from Indian attempts to destroy this nation.