The Kandahar incident was preceded by 15 other hijackings of Indian craft, but the investigative agencies have secured convictions in only one so far. Compared to the high drama at Kandahar the August 24, 1984 hijack seems like child’s play the hijack was pulled off by seven Khalistanis with a bottle of cough syrup disguised as a petrol bomb and a camera fitted with a digital watch to make it look like a time bomb.
A joke of a hijack, but the situation took a serious turn when the Indian Airlines Boeing, instead of proceeding to Srinagar, landed at Lahore, where the hijackers were given a 7.65 mm Walther pistol with ammunition.
The delivery of the weapon is a central point in the 415-page judgement on the hijacking delivered in a special court at Ajmer on March 15, 1993. The Dubai authorities handed over the weapon along with other evidence to the CBI. In all, 87 witnesses and 500 documents and articles were examined as evidence in the Ajmer trial.
The judgement reveals that the origin of the Waltherpistol No 445901 was obtained by India with the help of the Interpol division in Wiesbaden (former West Germany). In writing, Interpol had sent the CBI the information that the pistol was manufactured by Walther GMBH and had been delivered along with a consignment of 74 other pistol on September 22, 1975. The CBI informed the court that the consignee was the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Post Box, Ministry of Defence, Islamabad.
The special court in Ajmer was constituted by the order of the Home Ministry and it took eight long years for the CBI to secure the convictions. All seven hijackers, led by Kamaljit Singh Sandhu, were sentenced to life imprisonment by Justice R.K. Jain. They were freed last year, a few months before they completed the maximum sentence of 14 years.
Addressing the problem of punishing the hijackers under Indian law for a crime they committed in a foreign land, the judge pointed out that the evidence in such events can be used in two different ways. The judgement states:“Firstly, it can be used to corroborate the offenses committed within India and secondly it may be used to prove the offenses which were committed out of India… in my view the entire evidence of events which have taken place out of India can be considered for adjudicating the offenses which are alleged to have been committed before the aircraft crossed into Pakistan’s airspace.”
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Interestingly, none other than Dr K. Subrahmanyam, presently convenor of the National Security Council Advisory Board (NSCAB) was on the hijacked plane in 1984 and was a key witness for the prosecution. And just as Pakistan is insinuating that the hijack of IC-814 is the handiwork of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and that there was an agency official on board, Jain’s judgement shows that after the 1984 hijacking, a similar canard was raised against Subrahmanyam. Six of the seven hijackers had told the Ajmer court that it was K. Subrahmanyam who (to quote the judge), “planned the entire hijacking to supervise and examinethe nuclear installations of Pakistan.”
The judge, of course, dismissed such There are other similarities between the two hijackings, separated by a period of 15 years. The Khalistanis, who said they were hijacking the plane to protest against Operation Bluestar, first commandeered the Boeing to Lahore, then to Karachi and finally asked for landing permission in Bahrain. When Bahrain refused permission, Dubai became the destination. The air traffic controllers at Dubai also denied permission to the pilot, Captain V.K. Mehta, to land. The plane remained in a holding pattern over the airport for two hours and it was only after the pilot announced that he would be forced to ditch in the sea that the hijacked plane could land in Dubai. Incidentally, while in Karachi, the auxiliary power unit of the Airbus developed a snag and the plane could only take off after it was rectified.
The motive of the 1984 hijacking was evident from the minute the seven hijackers jumped out of their seats with their dummyweapons and shouted the Kalsa war cry, “Jo Boley So Nihal.” The plane was hijacked over Pathankot and the pilot, after being roughed up badly, was asked to fly over Amritsar so that the passengers could have darshan of the Golden Temple.
While the Ajmer judgement does not state this, it is implicit that while the hijackers wanted asylum in Pakistan, the authorities there decided on a better course of action: they refuelled the plane in Lahore and provided the hijackers with a weapon. It was handed over to Sandhu in a brown packet in full view of some passengers. Immediately on take-off, the hijackers began to brandish their newly-acquired weapon and ammunition; several eye-witnesses accounts of this are cited in the judgement. An air hostess was then asked to announce on the public address system that the Airbus was now the “Khalistan Airways flight No Sava Lakh Bravo.”
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More high jinks followed in Dubai, where the plane landed on the evening of August 25, 1984 and negotiations with the hijackers wereconducted by UAE Defence Minister Sheikh Mohammed-bin-Rashid-al-Maktoun, Indian Ambassador in Abu Dhabi Isharat Aziz and former Foreign Secretary Romesh Bhandari. The hijackers demanded safe passage to the US and the release of 14 Indian hijackers being held in Pakistan. Once the negotiators had agreed on a plan of deception, the hijackers were told that the passengers were being released on their terms. The hijackers celebrated by scribbling anti-India slogans on the windows with lipstick and nail-polish borrowed from an air hostess.
The talks ended in the manner the Indian negotiators at Kandahar must have been hopinmg theirs would. The seven hijackers were promised asylum in the US but all the while, Indian officials were prevailing upon the UAE authorities to hand them over to India. Eventually, the flight which Kamajlit Singh Sandhu and his six accomplices had deemed to be their flight to freedom took them to eight long years of captivity.
