Exposes India as a soft state, sparks a beheading and the Parliament attack.Christmas eve still sends shivers down the spine of Anil Jagia, 68, the flight engineer of IC-814, who went through the 192-hour ordeal of the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi on December 24. While one of the 189 hostages was killed, the hijacking exposed India as a soft state as the government swapped three terrorists-Maulana Masood Azhar, Ashfaq Ahmed Zargar alias Latram and Ahmed Omar Syed Sheikh- for the release of the hostages. Azhar went on to form the terror group Jaishe-Mohammed, masterminding the Parliament attack in 2001, and Sheikh murdered US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. The five hijackers roam freely in Pakistan, churning out more terrorists from their jihad factories. Few know that on board IC-814, a senior RAW official SBS Tomar was travelling on his diplomatic passport, carrying a report to Delhi that there was a likelihood of a hijack. How prophetic it was. There were glaring systemic lapses right from the time of the hijack. Flight captain Devi Sharan did not press the right hijacking frequency and the ATC was clueless about the hijack for some time. The then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's aircraft was in the vicinity of IC-814 but he was informed of the hijack only when he landed in Delhi. In Amritsar, where the aircraft could have been stopped, even basic emergency drill like putting an ambulance or a crash fire tender in front of the aircraft was not followed. Ten years later, the issue became controversial when Jaswant Singh, who had escorted the terrorists to Kandahar, stated that he had covered for the then home minister L.K. Advani, who was said to be against the tradeoff, a fact those privy to the discussions now flatly deny. The hijacked aircraft was sold as scrap by the airlines in 2003, Sharan works for Air India and is facing a sexual harassment charge levelled by an airhostess, which he denies. Jagia doesn't fly anymore and now works for a project management firm in Delhi. For the crew of IC-814, the flashback of the hijackers still haunts them. "We will see you again" the hijackers had said, surrounded by the Taliban at Kandahar. "The nightmare will never leave me," says Jagia. As 2611 in Mumbai showed, it didn't. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}-by Saurabh ShuklaThe main event: Kargil WarFor the past few years, the melting of the snow has always been heralded by the booming of guns across the Line of Control that divides India and Pakistan in Kashmir. But this year,when the two sides exchanged fire in the first week of May, there was some surprise. Only because just three months earlier, the heads of Government of the two countries had embraced each other warmly at the Wagah border, promising to work towards peace. After Pakistan gave Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee a 21-gun salute on his visit it was expected that the artillery of the two sides would fall silent for a while to give the historic Lahore Declaration a chance to succeed. The euphoria, however, melted as rapidly as the snow does on the crestline of the Kargil mountains at the approach of summer.India Today, June 7, 1999Published By: AtMigration Published On: Dec 24, 2009--- ENDS ---
