NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTION 99
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Hostage Insanity, circa Y1.999K

Thoughts about a hijacking at the end of 1999. In no particular order.

"We are a soft state", my friend said yesterday. We were watching television together, the coverage of the hijacking. "It's true," he went on, "if this had happened to Israel, they would have sent in a commando team by now to free the hostages."

Perhaps so. But as I listened to him, I remembered the time, nearly three years ago, I went to Israel. Not an obvious hijacker, or so I hope, I was still subjected to a long, searching examination at Bombay airport at the El Al counter. Not by the airport's lackadaisical security apparatus, but El Al's own Israeli security personnel.

The examination included a series of questions to which I was expected to supply detailed answers. It also included a few techniques I laughed at, but that were clearly meant as booby traps, designed to test my reactions. The whole exercise took nearly 30 minutes. Yet the amazing thing was, it was just routine. Every single passenger was put through it.

When I compare that half-hour grilling with what seems to have happened at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan airport a few days ago, it's as if someone's dragging their fingernails across a blackboard. I squirm. Apparently these hijackers simply walked across the lounge and into Indian Airlines' Flight 814. Nobody stopped them, nobody checked them. Fantastic, but true.

Naturally there's much justified anger with security measures, or the unforgivable lack of them, at Tribhuvan.

But exactly why did Indian Airlines not have its own security machinery, over and above what the airport provided, for passengers boarding its flights? Or were its personnel there bribed? Whichever, it is a poor commentary on IA; and, in some ways, on us all. Why has this aspect of this terrible situation deserved no comment at all? It's not enough to point the finger at the Tribhuvan authorities. When this tragic episode is over, IA must answer the question about its own security.

Of course, as these things go, I know IA won't.

***

But as must be obvious, this is not a criticism solely of IA. Security was "beefed up" at airports in the country after the hijacking. But is there a single person reading this column who feels reassured knowing that? Why are our airports filled with whispering touts offering innumerable dubious ways to part you from your money, fellows the police merely blink at? Who among us has not considered, even proudly carried out, ways to evade various restrictions in our planes and airports? (And by restrictions I mean, too, something as simple as keeping your seat belt fastened till the plane comes to a complete halt). Do we not know all about glorified VIPs who imperiously bypass any security checks at our airports, who feel offended if they do not?

If India is a soft State, it is not because we haven't sent in a crack commando unit to storm the plane in Kandahar. It is because we -- all of us -- don't really take the more basic things seriously. Security in this case.

***

Of course the government must not give in to the hijackers' demands. Which raises questions about the minister's daughter, several years ago: if we could release criminals then to secure that one lady's release, why not do it now to get these 150 captives released?

There is much logic there, and it is heartbreaking to refute that logic when it is proferred by people who have relatives on the plane. But it's the usual story: you give in to such thugs, you only encourage more of them. As Kashmiri Pandit groups have pointed out, the incident of the minister's daughter led to a spurt in killing and terror in Kashmir. No sense in repeating a mistake just because it was committed once.

***

Having said that, when will we sit down and hammer out, with all concerned, a solution to Kashmir? For a half-century now, "the time has not been right", or we have warred with Pakistan, or we have chosen to look elsewhere, or we have smugly proclaimed that legally, we are in the right, or something.

All well and good, but in the meantime, thousands have died. In the single largest ethnic displacement independent India has ever seen, Kashmiri Pandits have been driven from their homes. The festering of Kashmir has fed and nourished vicious hostility across the country between our two major religions, killing more thousands in spots, like Bombay and Coimbatore, very far from Kashmir. Our soldiers continue to die, in flares like Kargil as in the daily bush-fighting all along our border with Pakistan.

When the first person died because of entrenched positions on Kashmir, that was too high a price to pay. But today we have lost thousands. Today we are in the middle of another crisis that threatens more lives. When will we all tire of paying this price? When will we recognise the damage our own unbending positions are doing to us? Lives of Indians don't matter much to hijackers, I know. But when will they matter to the rest of us Indians more than lines on a map?

***

Which, naturally, brings me to those famous nukes. Of course I believe Pakistan has a hand in this hijacking, whether overt or covert or hidden or whatever. I also believe this is only one in a series of such episodes, Kargil being another. There must be thinking in Pakistan which goes on lines something like this: "Now that they have the bomb and we do too, neither of us can afford to use them. So we can go right ahead with all these provocations, these constant irritations, knowing that India can really do nothing to compel us to stop. After all, if they threaten war, we'll threaten to drop the bomb. If they threaten to drop the bomb, we'll threaten to drop the bomb."

Call it simplistic if you like. But it seems to me the nuke has made this kind of thinking appear thinkable. Which is why I do not believe this hijacking is the last such incident we've seen. Which makes all the talk of the nuclear bombs assuring us security about as hollow as was IA's security at Tribhuvan last Friday.

It's the same lesson, really. True security doesn't come from merely possessing the nuke, in the same way that the bluster about "beefing up" security is no comfort to anyone. True security comes from attending to the basics, whether in airport security or in primary education or in thinking about our Kashmir tangle. (Among others, Israel has learned that lesson).

I won't belabour this point here and now. But for a different angle on it, consider what Richard Cohen wrote recently in the Washington Post: "The common person ... recognizes his enemy. It is the common person."

***

Somebody wrote to The Times of India net poll people saying: "My message to the relatives of those taken hostage -- please show more courage. ... They should think of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives in Kargil."

I would love to ask this pontificating dude: show more courage? And how are they supposed to do that? These are ordinary folks driven to tears by worry over what's going on with their loved ones in that plane. They read the transcript of the pilot's conversation with the Amritsar Control Tower, in which the pilot, in a "crying voice", says: "Yaar, he has started killing the passengers. Why don't you understand our problem? Where is the [fuel], yaar?"

And they must "think of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives in Kargil." They must be suffering, agonizing, those relatives. The least we can do is spare them the pointless platitudes.

***

I note two items in the news as I write this.

One. Following a recent quarrel on a Bombay suburban train between a group of qawwali singers and another of bhajan singers, the railway police decided to ban singing altogether on trains. In response, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad tried to send 200 bhajan singers onto trains at Borivali and Thane on Tuesday morning. Prevented from doing so by the police, the VHP complained that commuter's rights were being curbed by the railway police commissioner. Their rights. I am not joking.

Two. A photograph of performers rehearsing for the "millennium show organised at Chowpatty." Millennium show. I am not joking.

150 people suffering in that plane with no end in sight as I write this. More deadly attacks by militants on army establishments in Srinagar. Enormous destruction and misery in Orissa from a cyclone 2 months ago, misery compounded by a corrupt and unresponsive administration. We lurch from one crisis to another.

But the millennium show must go on. Mere cops cannot be allowed to trample on commuters' "rights" to sing in trains. Those rights must be defended.

Goodbye 1999. May 2000 be saner, beginning with the safe return of those hostages.

Dilip D'Souza