External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recalled the time when he was handling a hijacking crisis and discovered that his father was on that hijacked flight.
Dr Jaishankar opened up about the 1984 Indian Airlines plane hijacking as the Netflix series, IC 814 - The Kandahar Hijack, brought back memories of the 1999 hostage-taking incident.
He shared an experience from his early days as a young officer in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in 1984, when he found out that his father was on a hijacked flight.
That realisation, Jaishankar said, dawned upon him as he phoned his mother.
Jaishankar's father, K Subrahmanyam was a strategic expert who later played a crucial role in shaping India's nuclear policy, emphasising the "no first use" policy and second-strike capability.
Speaking to the Indian community in Switzerland's Geneva, Jaishankar recalled the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 421 in 1984, a crisis he was part of handling as an officer, only to discover that his father was among the 79 passengers on board.
Jaishankar, who was a young officer in 1984, was part of the team handling the hijacking crisis. He joined the IFS in 1979. Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam was a prominent international strategic affairs analyst, journalist and a former Indian civil servant, who later emerged as the champion of India's nuclear deterrent.
The minister spoke of the 1984 hijacking incident as India was reminded of an incident from 1999 in which five terrorists hijacked the Indian Airlines Kathmandu-Delhi flight to Kandahar due to a Netflix series. The limited-series, IC 814 - The Kandahar Hijack, has been directed by Anubhav Sinha.
"My wife was working and was away so I could not go to my son, who was then hardly a few months old. I rang up my mother to inform her that there was a hijacking and I cannot come home to feed my son, who was a few months old then," he said in Geneva.
"On the one hand, I was part of the team working on the hijacking, on the other hand, I was part of the family members who were pressing the government on the hijacking. I had that unique window into both sides of the problem," said the diplomat-turned politician, who has been India's foreign minister since 2019.
S Jaishankar recounted the moment he found out about his father's presence on the flight, saying, "Four hours into the hijacking, I discovered that my father was on that flight". He was one of the officers handling the 1984 hijacking case.
This discovery put him in a unique position, straddling both the official response to the crisis and the personal concerns of his family, he said.
On August 24, 1984, Indian Airlines Flight 421 was hijacked by seven members of the banned All India Sikh Students Federation. The regional jetliner, en route from Delhi to Srinagar, had just made its first stop in Chandigarh when the hijackers seized control without any firearms.
They wielded kirpans and used a digital watch fixed on a camera to intimidate the crew and the passengers to re-route to Lahore.
Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam, who is regarded as one of the pioneers of realpolitik in India, an approach to diplomatic policies based on circumstances, rather than ideology, was on the ill-fated flight.
After the takeover, the flight was diverted to Lahore, then Karachi, before finally landing in Dubai. And, what enabled the hijacking was a German pistol, concealed in a white package, which made its ominous debut after the jet touched down in Lahore.
When the flight landed in Dubai, negotiations began with the active involvement of UAE Defence Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. As talks progressed, the passengers and crew endured a gruelling 14-hour wait in the sweltering Dubai heat, with the aircraft parked on the tarmac.
JAISHANKAR'S FATHER URGENTLY NEEDED INSULIN SHOTS
That was when S Jaishankar's father, K Subrahmanyam, then director of the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), a diabetic, urgently needed insulin shots.
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| Jaishankar and his dad |
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