My heart still aches to see the gory images of our soldiers who were martyred in the worst terrorist attack in 3 decades. In one image I saw a soldier who looked like a heap of scrambled flesh with just a hand visible. The Bus that was reduced to scrap of iron. 44 is the toll count right now.
Whenever this attack happens I can’t forget the fateful day when the Indian govt did the worst deal with the devil in the year 1999, the price of which our soldiers paid even yesterday in the Pulwama attack.
I am sure everyone remembers the most notorious hijacking that happened on 24th Dec 1999. The Indian Airlines Flight 814 that took off from Nepal carrying 176 passengers to Delhi but was diverted to multiple locations before landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The terrorists demand – release of three captured terrorists Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh & Maulana Masood Azhar.
Hostages – 176
There was mounting pressure on the then Indian govt led by Mr. Vajpayee. There was a plan to foil the attack when the plane landed in Amritsar with a fuel tanker filled with the RAW officers were going to storm the plane. But the Tanker stopped abruptly and the terrorist got a hint of something fishy and took off. It is said that Mr.Tomar, brother in law of then secretary of Vajpayee, R K Singh was on the plane and for his safety, this plan was abandoned(My blood boils every time I read this). The pressure intensified when one of the passenger Rupan Katyal was killed and thrown on the tarmac.
And finally, the Indian Govt gave in to the demand of the terrorists and released all 3 terrorists in exchange to the 175 hostages
At that point in time, it must have felt like a decent deal.
3 terrorists in exchange of saving 175 lives but the fine print was never read.
All the fatal attacks right from Parliament attack, 26/11 Mumbai attack, URI attack, and the recent Pulwama attack was all masterminded by none other than Masood Azhar who was released on that day.
Reporter Daniel Pearl was notoriously beheaded by the then released terrorist Omar Sheikh
If you do the calculation now although at that time 175 hostages were saved. But now if you combine the casualty of just these 3 major attacks, we lost 174 (26/11 Mumbai Attack), 18 soldiers (URI), and recent Pulwama attack saw a death toll of 40 Soldiers. So we lost close to 240 in which there were 58 soldiers and more than 15 Police official.
(These are just major attacks. There were multiple other attacks that have happened and thus would add to the death toll )
I don’t know how many more Jawans, Police, and civilians might die because of the one fatal and worst possible deal made by the then Govt.
And it’s not that we never used decisive measure in such highjacking.
In 1982 when a Sikh militant hijacked Indian Airlines, the security forces killed the hijacker and rescued all the 69 passengers.
Even in 1993 when Indian Airlines was hijacked by 3 terrorists, the security forces killed 2 of them and captured one.
So this question will always trouble when such terrorist attack happens.
Why did my Govt make a deal with the devil, why?
