A Brain-dead Behemoth

Through the entire second half of 1998 and the early 1999, while Pakistan was preparing for its assault on Kargil and flexing its muscles by pounding the Leh-Srinagar road, the Indian defence establishment was preoccupied with a battle to establish 'civilian supremacy over the armed forces'. This, the bureaucrats and minister claimed, was the very essence of parliamentary democracy. Many bought this argument. Till Kargil. Rather than prevent a massive intelligence failure, civilian supremacy had contributed directly to it, for had the ministries of defence and finance between them not held up payment to the Russians for satellite photographs with a one-metre resolution, the intrusion would have been discovered weeks ahead and 480 Indian lives might not have been lost on the icy heights.

The hijacking of IC 814 from Kathmandu has given civilian supremacy its second hard knock. That the entire bureaucracy and political establishment failed is now virtually a truism. But one needs to look at what happened with a microscope to see just how badly it did so.

Let us begin at the beginning: between 1992 and 1998, there have been 108 hijackings of civilian aircraft. Of these, only 12 were carried out by terrorists with a political agenda. In only three of the 12 did the hijackers demand a release of prisoners. All the 12 terrorist hijackings were aimed at Indian Airlines (IA)! Thus, no Indian government had any excuse for not maintaining the highest state of readiness to deal with hijackings at all times. The state of alert should have been beefed up around the New Year because the Indian government had information (which also appeared in the press) that militants were planning something spectacular for the millennium. Instead, what one was treated to was a spectacle of dysfunctionality that has few parallels. Let us look at what actually happened.

The task of foiling hijackings is delegated to a Special Action Group of the NSG. In 1993, the NSG had the capacity to take off within 90 minutes of a hijack. Indeed, a fully-equipped plane is kept on permanent standby at Palam in Delhi. Everyone agrees that 90 minutes was too long, so over the next six years this should've been pared down. Instead, at some point, the NSG was moved from close to Palam airport to a new location 15 minutes further away.

In 1993, the NSG's command and control centre was in Delhi, making contact easy and fast. By 1999, that too had been shifted 54 km out of Delhi. This wouldn't have mattered if other systems of communications-mobile phones, video-conferencing equipment-had been installed. But clearly, this hadn't been done, for the first the NSG got to know of the hijacking was on the PTI teleprinter at 5.01 pm. The person on duty then called the home ministry, only to be asked by the officer concerned, "What hijacking?"

The hijacking took place just after 4.50 pm on December 24. Prime minister Vajpayee was informed of it only at 5.20 pm. Till today, no one has explained what caused the delay of 28 minutes or more in informing him.

Within the bureaucracy, dealing with hijacking is the responsibility of the crisis management committee. This panel is headed by the cabinet secretary, who is assisted by other secretaries like those of civil aviation, defence and the prime minister's office. The committee did not meet till 6.00 pm and when it did, took no decisions at all on the grounds that it did not have enough information. The fact that information is always lacking in the early stages of a hijacking and that decisions have therefore to be taken on a best-guess basis obviously did not occur to it. Nor apparently did it strike the cabinet secretary that the buck stopped with him and that he did not have to wait for the committee to meet before he took decisions and gave orders. When the group did finally meet it was, by all accounts, paralysed by differences between the cabinet secretary, who heads it, and the prime minister's secretary, who took his functions as the national security advisor a shade too seriously. Battles over turf were clearly more important than established chains of command.

In the 1993 IA hijacking, there'd been excellent coordination between the services and the NSG. The hijacker had forced the pilot to stop the plane halfway down the runway to prevent other flights from landing. So the NSG had to fly to a nearby military airport and transfer to helicopters. When they arrived there, they found the helicopters already waiting for them. By contrast, this time the service chiefs had to request a meeting with the prime minister before they were brought into the decision-making loop. By that time, it was too late. The plane was already out of India.

The comedy of errors did not stop there. The NSG could not take off because while the aircraft was ready on the tarmac, the two negotiators who were supposed to fly with the NSG were nowhere to be found! The same story was repeated in Punjab. Despite the fact that the majority of hijacked IA flights had been forced to land at Amritsar, the Punjab DGP learned about the hijacking only from Star TV! After the flight landed in Amritsar, the laid-down procedure required the establishment of a hijack committee at Amritsar airport, headed by the state chief secretary. This worthy too could not be found either in person or on the phone. All this happened in a bureaucracy where the cellphone has now become the indispensable benchmark of status!

The mess that India made of the hijacking highlights the frightening erosion of both accountability and initiative that has taken place in the bureaucracy. This is the rusted and pitted 'steel frame' with which India must now face the most determined state-backed terrorist onslaught any country has ever known. God alone knows how it will do so.