On Christmas Eve 1999, I was watching a holiday movie in my New Delhi flat when I heard that an Indian Airlines plane — en route from Kathmandu to Delhi — had been hijacked. With about 176 passengers on board, the plane first landed at India’s Amritsar airport, where it stood for around 45 minutes. It then flew on to Lahore, in Pakistan, to re-fuel and to Dubai, where 26 hostages were freed. Finally, it flew to Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airport, under Taliban control.
In the following days, India’s then Bharatiya Janata party government struggled to secure the hostages’ release. The hijackers wanted New Delhi to free three Islamist militant leaders from Indian prisons. The hostages’ distraught relatives were making emotional appeals for whatever was necessary to secure their loved ones’ safe return.
On New Year’s Eve, New Delhi capitulated. India’s urbane foreign minister Jaswant Singh, who had seemingly aged a decade in a week, escorted the militants to Kandahar for the exchange. Among the Islamists freed that day was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-Pakistani, who went on to murder US journalist Daniel Pearl. Another was Masood Azhar, who would set up Pakistan-based group Jaish e-Mohammad, which is thought to have carried out a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.