MEA gets it right

The Foreign Office has got it just right in its intervention to bring home the hapless Indian passengers on the flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai. It has been criticised for not doing enough for those who carry the nation8217;s passport and get into trouble abroad. This time though the Foreign Office deserves congratulations for its decisive actions in a delicate situation. It would have been easy for the Foreign Office to have taken to cheap rhetoric on western racism. Instead, it chose to focus on three practical objectives: gain immediate consular access to the stranded passengers, get them released from detention, and put them back on the first available plane to Mumbai.

The government has rightly called the incident on board the as 8220;unfortunate8221; and protested the treatment meted out to them in Amsterdam. The Dutch investigating agencies have concluded there was no evidence to suggest that the harassed passengers were about to commit any crime on-board the aircraft. The Dutch government has been quick to express regret. While the government awaits a full report from the Indian mission in the Netherlands and debriefs the returning passengers, the airline crew appears to have over-reacted to the behaviour of a group of men, who happened to be Muslim, young, and Indian. The decision to turn the flight back to Amsterdam was driven by panic, which has become all-pervasive in the air travel industry.

The recently uncovered of the Heathrow conspiracy has destroyed the relative sense of safety that had come after enhanced security procedures in airports since the dramatic events of September 11, 2001. The Amsterdam incident is unlikely to be the last one reflecting the new nervousness in the flying business. Nor would it be limited to foreign lands. The situation that led to the awful mix-up on the North Western flight could have well happened on any Indian airliner. India, which rightly claims to be the world8217;s biggest victim of terrorism, has had its own difficulties in balancing the imperatives of counter-terrorism with the defence of civil rights. As the worldwide war against the invisible enemy, who targets civilians in the name of redressing real and imagined political grievances, turns out to be a prolonged affair, India must strive with other democracies to refine ways to differentiate between criminals, who must be caught, and innocents who must be protected.