IC 814 hijack: Former diplomat AR Ghanashyam recounts the tense first moments

In the evening of 24 December, 1999, Shahid Khan, Press Trust of India (PTI) correspondent in Islamabad, Pakistan, informed High Commissioner Gopalaswamy Parthasarathy that the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 that took off from Kathmandu and which was scheduled to land in New Delhi had been hijacked in Indian airspace. Parthasarathy must have realised that the Mission in Pakistan will be dragged into the episode sooner than later going by past precedents. He summoned all the officers to the Chancery for a meeting to bring everyone up to date. As was feared, the aircraft did head to Lahore. The high commissioner was to be flown from the air force base in Islamabad to Lahore. Before he could proceed, news came that the aircraft had left Lahore. We opened a logbook in the High Commission and started recording regular situation reports and kept following the news. We were informed the next day that IC 814 had landed in Kandahar at 8.55 am.

It was 26 December 1999. My wife Ruchi and I were watching Television News at our home in Islamabad. The telephone rang. It was 10 pm, the night was chilly and the air was still. The high commissioner summoned both of us to his residence, the India House. We reached almost immediately; India House was right next to our residence, with only a compound between us in block F-7 of Islamabad. We just walked across. A tray of tea with some nuts and biscuits was kept on the centre table. Without wasting any time the high commissioner said, “The government has decided to send Ghanashyam to Kandahar.”

For a few seconds, there was silence in the room. Several questions started whirring in my mind. At the outset, I dealt with neither the political desk nor the security aspects of the Mission. In fact, I worked on totally unrelated issues of Trade and Economy. The first question, therefore, was why I was detailed for Kandahar. The second was: What am I supposed to do there? Am I to get in touch with the hijackers and, if so, what would I ask them or tell them? Third, how long would I be gone? I did raise these questions, but no one including, the high commissioner himself, knew the answers.

I had read about the ruthless manner in which the Taliban conducted their policy of implementing Islamic Shariat. In August 1998, they had hacked ten Iranian diplomats and an Iranian journalist in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. By then, I had already seen several reports of gruesome violence in Afghanistan. Be that as it may, for some inexplicable reason, I was curious and maybe even excited rather than being worried or scared about being sent to the Taliban land.

The high commissioner concluded the meeting after informing me that a UN plane would take me to Kandahar and that I would have to be at the Islamabad Airport by dawn on 27 December 1999.

We returned home, with both of us buried in thought about what lay ahead. Our two young sons were asleep. I packed my clothes and put in some woollens to see me through the single-digit temperature in Kandahar. By hand, I carried a rainproof overcoat with faux fur lining inside. In my briefcase, I had my basic toiletries, a warm grey pashmina shawl, a 200-page exercise notebook, and some pens and pencils. The notebook became my prized possession since I kept my notes in it. Although nobody had asked me to keep notes, I thought to myself that I may never again witness such an extraordinary event and decided to chronologically record each development.

I left home in the wee hours of the morning of 27 December in a limousine of the Indian High Commission. When I reached the Islamabad Airport, it was still dark. The immigration formalities were completed after some wait. Officials from the airport then escorted me to the small UN aircraft. A short ladder with half a dozen steps was in position for me to board the aircraft. With my overcoat and briefcase, I entered the empty aircraft and sat on a seat close to the door. It had some ten or twelve seats with only the cockpit crew and one technician.

By the time the aircraft took off, it was well past sunrise. The airport looked simply beautiful, swept in the golden rays of the morning sun. Once airborne, I kept looking at the landscape of mountains, some green and some snowclad, and fields without much vegetation. During the entire flight, there was nobody to talk to. I tried to remain calm and took periodic deep breaths. I kept my mind blank and avoided thinking about what the day had on offer for me.

After about three hours, the aircraft commenced its descent. When we landed and the aircraft began skiing on the long and never-ending runway, I saw to my left abandoned cannibalised aircraft, vehicles and bits and pieces of steel and rubber strewn all along. That was indeed a whole lot of junk and a huge amount of steel. Finally, the aircraft came to a standstill. The door opened and the descending ladder was let down.

When I stood at the door of the aircraft, my eyes went straight to the IC 814 Airbus parked perhaps about 150 metres away, with all its window shutters down. I then looked down and noticed two people standing at the edge of the ladder – a tall white gentleman and another who looked shorter perhaps because he was next to a tall one. The tall person was the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The other was wearing a white Afghan tunic and a sleeveless black jacket, gold-rimmed glasses and a shining black turban with a long tail that flowed out of the turban at the back. It was Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, Taliban foreign minister.

With a diffident smile I shook hands with both, wished the representative of OCHA “good morning and happy to meet you” and greeted the Taliban foreign minister with the traditional Islamic greeting – “Assalaamu Alaikum”. I then excused myself to go to the washroom. It was a long flight and there was no toilet in the aircraft. Outside the airport lounge, I could only see three washrooms, each with a pot, a sink and a little space for ablutions and bathing. I wondered later how so many journalists, cameramen and diplomats of countries whose nationals were passengers in the hijacked plane managed with such minimal facilities.

Mutawakil was unsure of how to deal with me. He spoke Pushtu and I didn’t. I spoke English, but he was not comfortable with it. I could feel the anxiety in the eyes and tones of both gentlemen when they told me that I should straightaway get in touch with my interlocutors in the aircraft. The OCHA representative added, “The plane arrived in Kandahar two days ago and those in control inside the aircraft are extremely angry and annoyed with the Government of India for the delay in the commencement of negotiations.”

It was the month of Ramadan, when religious Muslims fast during the day, eating only after sunset and before the following sunrise. That must have made them even more irritable.

Someone took the footage as I was descending from the short ladder of the UN aircraft in Kandahar on the forenoon of 27 December. This footage and a photograph of the parked IC 814 Airbus 320 aircraft were by far the two templates used continuously by the Indian and international media. Out of the blue “an Indian diplomat AR Ghanashyam, Counsellor in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, reaches Kandahar” became the headline. I had no idea; although there were several journalists and any number of still picture cameras and video cameras outside the airport lounge, I had no access to television news channels. The days of ubiquitous smartphones were still years away and communication was mostly through the most expensive satellite phones.

The time I spent in Kandahar must also have been an anxious period for my own family, including my wife, our two little boys, colleagues and close friends. A host of near and dear ones from schools and colleges where I studied and offices where I had worked suddenly realised that they recognised me. Some would tell me years later, when I got to meet them, how excited they were to suddenly see me on television on that occasion. In Ajjampur, my little place of birth in Karnataka, one newspaper’s headline announced proudly in Kannada: “Karnataka’s son in Kandahar”. Strangely, very few seemed to have realised that my life could have been at risk out there in Kandahar.

I was escorted to the control tower of the airport by a burly gentleman who managed to communicate with me in broken English and Urdu. Much later, I would learn that it was Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, then in charge of the aviation and air force facility at Kandahar. He was also the Corps Commander of Kandahar (CCK).

I climbed the many steps to reach the cabin at the top of the control tower along with CCK. I felt cramped inside the cabin, which had all kinds of machines and equipment. Once I reached it, I was given a microphone with a speaker in front of me. The officer in charge of the control tower informed the aircraft that the first Indian official had arrived and was in the control tower ready to establish contact with the interlocutors in the aircraft. I was straightaway in touch on voice, not face to face, with one of the hijackers – their designated communicator.

For me personally, it had been a long and anxious wait for this moment. I wished my interlocutor “Assalamu Alaikum”. In his enthusiasm to pounce on me, he forgot to return my greetings and went on a long, winding harangue about the “excesses of the Indian armed forces in Kashmir” and how “inhuman and deplorable was the treatment being meted out to the people of Kashmir by the Indian government”.

He sat on his high horse and sermonised with great elan. He may have had his last meal before sunrise, as per religious practice in the month of Ramadan, which was at least seven to eight hours ago. He still had the energy to speak loud and clear in chaste Urdu. “The more he speaks, the more time I gain and that is good,” I thought to myself. I realised that there was no point in getting irritated and countering his allegations, which would have further excited and emboldened him to become more difficult than he already was. Thinking that discretion was the better part of valour, I didn’t interrupt or immediately respond.

When he seemed to have tired out and fell silent, I asked him quietly in Urdu, “Janab, do you have any message for me to communicate to my government?” That seemed to infuriate him no end and he started shouting again, “What kind of country are you? What kind of government do you have? Here we are, waiting for more than two days for your delegation to get in touch with us. Don’t you care for the lives of people inside the aircraft who are your citizens? If there is any further delay, I will start killing passengers one by one and every hour you will have a new body thrown on the tarmac. Are you prepared for it? Are you listening to me?”

I realised that the situation was turning serious and could easily go out of hand. I constantly reminded myself that these wretched men had come prepared to die if need be. They had all the protection and I had none. They had nothing to lose, and I had everything, including the passengers and the aircraft, to lose. I was painfully aware that the aircraft that was to transport the Indian delegation from New Delhi had developed some technical glitch and a new aircraft had to be organized which had taken some extra time.

I responded calmly, slowly and clearly in Hindi/Urdu, “Janab, at the outset I am already here, and you are talking to me. What makes you think that there will be further delay? Our delegation is ready to board and any time they will fly out of Delhi and reach here. As you would be aware, governments have rules to abide by, procedures to follow and approvals to be obtained from concerned authorities at each step of the decision-making process. The prime minister and his cabinet are personally monitoring the situation and facilitating the decisions to expedite the departure of the delegation to Kandahar. You must have patience. Like I said earlier, am I not already here?” That is how the conversation was concluded.

Excerpted with permission from An Indian Woman in Islamabad: 1997-2000, Ruchi Ghanashyam, with a chapter by AR Ghanashyam, Penguin India.