Hopes soar with assurance of Taliban's cooperation

The Times of India

By Dileep Padgaonkar

NEW DELHI: Hopes of an early and peaceful end to the hijacking crisis soared on Monday after influential elements of the Taliban left New Delhi in no doubt that Afghanistan's hardline Islamic regime would extend its fullest cooperation to India to ensure the safe return of the passengers and the crew of the ill-fated Indian Airlines plane grounded in Kandahar.

Without such a reassurance from the regime - which India, like most nations in the world, does not recognise - the Indian authorities would have been completely hamstrung to even establish a dialogue with the hijackers, let alone devise ways and means to meet the government's twin objectives: secure the release of the passengers and the crew and, above all, to uphold the overall national interest.

Highly placed sources in the government explained that once the plane landed in Kandahar, which was the destination of the hijackers from the very start, New Delhi had to find out how much support they effectively enjoyed from the Taliban. The government had every reason to believe that Pakistan's ISI and some elements of the Taliban were in cahoots with the hijackers. But it was also aware that the Taliban is not as cohesive a force as it is made out to be.

The first indications that this support was not fulsome came, according to the sources, when late on Friday evening influential figures of the regime convened a shura, a decision-making assembly of elders, to discuss the hijacking. When various Taliban officials subsequently let it be known that they regarded the hijackers to be ``unreliable criminals'' and vowed to storm the plane after the hijackers threatened to kill the hostages if their demands were not met, New Delhi was convinced that the two did not see eye-to-eye.

This was the moment the government was waiting for before it could swing into action. Any move on its part to talk to the hijackers or send emissaries, doctors and a new crew to Kandahar earlier would have been fraught with terrible risks. For obvious reasons, it could not have divulged its strategy. To do so would have meant playing straight into the hands of Pakistan and those Taliban elements sworn to unbridled hostility towards India.

The story of India's decision to make a clean break with its stated position regarding the Taliban regime must await the disclosure of more details. It is an opportunity for the Taliban, considered a pariah by the international community, to come out of its isolation by helping New Delhi resolve the hijack crisis.

The sources said that even as New Delhi was awaiting signals from the Taliban of its willingness to cooperate with Indian authorities, the latter were engaged in intensive diplomatic activity around the world. The fact that governments were observing a holiday - the hijacking took place on Boxer's Day, then the Christmas weekend intervened and Ramzan is still on - was a major impediment to get governments to react to the outrage.

Even so, external affairs minister Jaswant Singh was able to personally speak to the foreign ministers of 15 countries, including those of the major powers, to urge them to make Pakistan see reason. Alongside, Indian envoys in various world capitals briefed governments on the hijacking developments as did India's permanent representative at the UN in New York.

The government, the sources said, was clear from the very beginning that it would not allow the UN to play any kind of an intermediary role but it was not averse to let the world body, and indeed representatives of other foreign missions, be present in Kandahar to witness India's determination to combat yet another instance of international terrorism sponsored from across the border.

The sources said that the controversy over the demands made by the hijackers was not warranted. This was partly because their identity could not be firmly established, partly because the so-called demands were never made formally but communicated through the pilot and the Taliban authorities (and hence could have been mere ploys) and partly because the demands themselves became more and more bizarre. On one occasion, for instance, the hijackers reportedly said that they would release 15 hostages for every PoW in Indian custody.

The sources also revealed that another controversy - regarding the government's failure to ground the plane in Amritsar - will be set to rest once an inquiry of what transpired on a minute-to-minute basis is completed. It was pointed out that the first instructions sent from New Delhi was to stop the aircraft. However, the hijacker asked the pilot, with a knife pointing to his neck, to shift the aircraft every five to seven minutes. The full story of how it did manage to leave for Lahore must await the results of the inquiry.

(However, according to a late-night UNI report, the government denied that an inquiry had been ordered into what happened at Amritsar's Raja Sansi airport when the hijacked plane had stopped there.)