A Strategy to Deter Terrorism continues....

Moreover, the terrorists were escorted by a senior Minister on the PM’s special Boeing all the way to Kandhahar as royal guests instead of being shoved across the Indo-Pakistan border.

Worse still, all the three after being freed, went back to Pakistan and created three separate terrorist organizations to kill Hindus. Mohammed Azhar, whom the National Security Adviser Brijesh Mishra had then described [on NDTV] as “a mere harmless cleric,” upon his release led the Jaish-e-Mohammed to savage and repeated terrorists attacks on Hindus all over India from Bangalore to Srinagar. Since mid-2000, Azhar is responsible for killing of over 3,000 Hindus and also the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament. Omar Sheikh is in jail for killing US journalist Daniel Pearl and is in US custody, while the third, Zargar, is engaged today in random killings of Hindus in Doda and Jammu through his Lashkar-e-Jingan.

What should India have done instead? In the first place, it is a mystery how the IA plane shrewdly brought by the pilots to land in Amritsar was allowed to take-off again. That was a missed chance which counter-hijack experts find inexplicable. Who was responsible for allowing the plane to take-off? At very least, the tyres of the plane should have been punctured by the NSG present at the airport, positioned with long-range rifles to immobilize the aircraft. A future government ought to inquire into this matter and fix responsibility.

The then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, who has written about this in this memoirs, told me that the main motivation in yielding to the hijackers’ demand was the seeming collapse of civil society, especially the relatives of the passengers. His government was being counselled to save the lives of the passengers whatever the cost, while hardly any wanted the ‘no deal with terrorist’ taken. Even the Congress Party in opposition had favoured capitulation.

Nevertheless, the cost paid could have been minimized if [when the plane had landed in Kandahar] the Indian Government had threatened to take counter ground action if any of the passengers had been harmed by the hijackers.

To be continued....