Pray, do not mock me ...

 

In the IPS, a lot rides on what is called a charge posting. The postings prior to that are all supposed to prepare you for this big thing for which you are essentially recruited. This is the post of SP, DC, DCP, Commandant, etc. where a lot of autonomy vests in you and in a substantive sense, the buck stops with you. My first charge posting was as SP, Calcutta airport. In this post, my main remit was to prevent and counter a hijack.

Soon after assuming charge in 1995, I enquired as to whether Calcutta airport had seen any hijacking incident in the recent past. On learning that there was one incident of hijacking where a hijacked plane was force-landed at Calcutta airport in 1990, I thought I should go through the files to learn more about a real-life incident. What I read shocked me.

 

On November 10, 1990, a Thai Airways Airbus 300 (flight TG 305) was hijacked during a flight from Bangkok to Yangon (Myanmar) by two Burmese students (Ye Marn and Ye Htink Yaw) and forced to land at Calcutta airport. There were 221 passengers and crew aboard.

 

It was a Saturday. The hijacked aircraft landed at Calcutta airport in the afternoon. Coincidentally, the Airport Director at the time happened to have returned to Calcutta airport during my tenure after serving other postings in the interregnum. Immediately when a hijacking takes place, several Committees of escalating importance swing into action. A critical one is the Committee at the airport. A dedicated room with the required gadgets, equipment and resources is earmarked for the purpose. The Airport Director convenes this Committee which is headed by the state Home Secretary or a very senior officer. The Airport Director received the information at home and immediately rushed to the airport, a five-minute distance. He tried to convene the Committee. However, these were pre-cellphone days and further, the incident occurred on a holiday. The Committee Chairman was not home and could not be contacted immediately. The other key person, the SP, airport was also not home and he too could not be contacted. Some of the other members who could be contacted, assembled, but in the absence of the above two key persons, were completely at a loss as to what to do.

 

The hijackers sent a list of six demands for the Myanmar government, viz., the release of all political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi; the withdrawal of martial law and the abolition of all military tribunals; the reopening of the universities which were closed down after the 1988 military coup; handing over of power to the National League for Democracy which scored a landslide victory in the 1990 general elections, and so on. The hijackers kept waiting and waiting but there was no response.

 

It would be four hours before the Committee Chairman and the SP, airport could reach the airport. Meanwhile, the Burmese students, seeing that no one was responding to them or talking to them, suspected that there would be armed intervention so they called out to surrender, merely requesting a Press Conference. Thus, inadvertent inaction had a fortunate fallout. Even so, the situation lasted a good ten hours.

 

The contents of the file disturbed me greatly. These hijackers were young students with grievances against another country. Their demands also pertained to that country. The ‘weapon’ they used was a laughing Buddha statue wrapped in tissue paper with some wires protruding from it. They claimed it was a bomb but, in reality, it was innocuous. I shuddered to think what would have happened if they were hardcore terrorists armed with lethal weapons and with pressing demands for the Indian government. I rushed to meet the Airport Director who substantiated all that I had read and also filled in the gaps. I asked him whether the situation would be any better if, even as we were talking, a plane was hijacked and involved Calcutta airport. He responded with cautious optimism. I suggested we should visit the Committee Room. When we reached there, we found that no one seemed to know where the key was. It took one full hour to find the key and open the room. Upon entering, I found the room to be full of cobwebs with a thick layer of dust on all the tables and chairs. There were assorted landline phones some of which were hotlines to various authorities. Hardly any of them was working. All this shook me up.

 

I felt that the way out was to have regular mock exercises. Those days, cell phones were still some days away in the future but pagers had just arrived. I armed all the Inspectors and Dy SPs with a pager each and told them to rush to the airport in any available transport the moment they received a message of hijacking or certain other specified incidents on the pager. I also drew up a check list of who all needed to be contacted with their telephone numbers and sequence of contact and hung it up at each office.

 

Many years later, when I got to head the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), the aviation security regulator for the 100 or so airports in the country, the first thing I checked was the frequency of the mock exercises. I found that only 10 % of the airports had conducted such an exercise in the previous year. I kept stressing on mock exercises. Most of my colleagues thought I was wasting time on something unimportant. Behind my back, they used to mock my mock exercises. However, I persevered and before I completed my tenure with BCAS, each single airport was conducting at least two such exercises per year and also mock-exercised for other contingencies like bomb threats, attack on the airport or aviation facilities, etc. under rigorous monitoring. It paid off in spades on at least two occasions including when Pathankot airport came under attack.