When news networks announced on the afternoon of February 5 that Abdul Latif, Yusuf Nepali and Dilip Kumar Bhujail had been awarded life sentences for their involvement in the fateful hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 in December 1999, painful memories returned to me about that time. I was in the Indian high commission in Islamabad on the afternoon of December 24, 1999, when Zee News announced that an Indian Airlines flight bound for New Delhi had been hijacked on take off from Kathmandu.

Having handled two hijackings as consul general in Karachi in 1984, against the backdrop of militancy in Punjab, I had the uneasy feeling that like aircraft hijackings in the past, even this one would inevitably have a Pakistani connection. The ISI had in 1984 actually provided a pistol to the hijackers at Lahore airport. Having observed the working of the Pakistan military during a hijacking in 1984, I had no doubt that General Musharraf would behave no differently in dealing and colluding with the hijackers from General Zia-ul-Haq, in 1984. In 1984, however, Indira Gandhi had no intention of yielding to the demands of the hijackers, who were soon repatriated to India from Dubai.

It is not the purpose of this article to narrate all that transpired between December 24 and December 31, 1999. The full records of every conversation, including talks with Taliban diplomats and actions taken, were meticulously recorded by the high commission. They should perhaps be made public. But, it would suffice to say that New Delhi was totally unprepared to deal with the situation. Things were messed up in every respect, ranging from the inability to act decisively to terminate the hijacking in Amritsar, the insensitive manner in which the relatives of the passengers were treated and the media handled, to the entire fiasco of sending a hotchpotch team without an empowered senior and universally respected negotiator to Kandahar. One could not also understand the refusal to make public the fact that the high commission had sought and obtained an assurance from the Taliban that the aircraft would be stormed by them if even a single passenger was harmed by the hijackers. The Taliban felt compelled to give this assurance because they were warned of the serious international consequences of any harm coming to the passengers. Sadly, the Clinton administration was too engrossed in its last Christmas holidays of the 20th century to offer any tangible support, or mount any pressure on the Musharraf dispensation, which was working hand in glove with the Taliban and the hijackers.

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