IC-814 hijack: Ex-NSA says any Govt would’ve released terrorists

“The only place where it could have been handled differently was in Amritsar. I don’t believe a word of any leader who says that he would have done it differently,that he would have not released the three terrorists to save the lives of 160 passengers on the plane. I dare anyone to say that,” said Mishra.

The former bureaucrat,who was also the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee besides being the NSA,said the Government had sent out instructions to deflate the tyres of the hijacked plane in Amritsar to prevent it from taking off but somehow it could not be done.

“To this day we do not know what exactly happened there because there was no inquiry into the incident after that,” he said.

“There was,timewise,very limited opportunity to do something,which the critics don’t realise,” he said.

The handling of the Kandahar case,in which the Indian Government released three dreaded terrorists in exchange of 160 passengers on board the hijacked IC-814,has been often criticised by the Congress and its allies,especially in view of the fact that the then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh had also boarded the same plane to Kandahar that was taking the terrorists being released.

Mishra said Jaswant Singh had gone to Kandahar because the negotiators had asked the Indian Government to send some senior official at the spot to take a decision in a case of emergency and that no one was able to “visualise” the scenario that he would be travelling in the same plane alongside the terrorists.

“None of us visualised that he was going to be the there with the three terrorists in the same plane. I didn’t,” he said.

Mishra also spoke about BJP’s dilemma over Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the wake of 2002 communal riots and the alienation in the middle classes that the party had caused by opposing the nuclear deal.

On Vajpayee’s stand on Modi in 2002,Mishra said he did not think it was possible for the Prime Minister to outrightly demand the resignation of Modi.

“Probably,he could have taken a stand which would have obliged Modi to make amends. I think that was possible. But I don’t think it was possible to tell him (Modi) to resign and go,” he said.

In the first part of the interview,that was telecast last week,Mishra had criticised the BJP’s strategy in the recent polls and said Varun Gandhi’s “repugnant” hate speech in Pilibhit had caused the “greatest amount of damage” to the party’s electoral fortunes.