India’s multi-ethnic hijackers will baffle any anti-terrorist theoretician

LOW-CASTE Hindus, neo-Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs and Brahmins have all hijacked planes in India. Their motives have ranged from serious separatist politics to a laughable quest, if hijacking allows for humour, of seeking the postponement of college exams!

Two hijackers who commandeered an Indian Airlines plane in 1978 were brothers, Pande brothers if I remember correctly, indicating their upper caste Hindu lineage. They were supporters of Indira Gandhi. Armed with toy guns they told the pilot they wanted Mrs Gandhi freed from prison where she languished briefly after her opponents defeated her in an election that followed her emergency rule and jailed her. One of the hijacking brothers groomed into a political hero of sorts. He was elected to the Uttar Pradesh state legislature with the support of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party. He is still believed to be active in politics.

A 1993 hijacker, Satish Chandra Pandey, was a passionate devotee of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was leader of the opposition. Strangely, a key motive for his hijacking the plane on a cold January morning was to be urged by his hero, Mr Vajpayee, to surrender, which he did. I am not sure if this is a free man today, or a popular BJP hero or a forgotten jailbird.

The same year, four students (never mind their religion) claiming to be armed with explosives hijacked an Indian domestic airliner to demand postponement of their annual university exams, but they were overpowered by fellow passengers.

It was India’s second hijacking in two weeks and the third that year. The four forced the Indian Airlines flight to return to Lucknow after it took off for New Delhi. Then in a bizarre twist they demanded an audience with Uttar Pradesh Governor Satyanarayana Reddy. Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state and Lucknow, 350kms southeast of New Delhi, is its capital. State elections are due there any time again.

The hijackers said they wanted their exams postponed because Lucknow University had been shut down for a long period due to sectarian riots in the wake of the Dec 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindus in Ayodhya, 120kms east of Lucknow. More than 1,600 people were killed in the riots across India. The mosque demolition also sparked violence in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

The students also demanded that the government allocate 50 million rupees ($1.6 million) to their college to begin a new master’s programme.

On March 27 that year, a former trucker claiming to be a member of India’s governing Congress party hijacked an Indian domestic airliner with 203 people on board to voice his frustration over the state of affairs in the country. The 37-year-old unemployed hijacker, who called India’s politicians “crooks”, surrendered to the police in Amritsar after failing to get permission for the plane to land in Lahore.

In Jan 1994 a lone hijacker, claiming to be a neo-Buddhist, a low caste Hindu convert, commandeered an Indian Airlines Bangalore-Madras A-320 Airbus with 56 passengers and seven-man crew. The hijacker wanted Marathwada University to be renamed after Dr B. R. Ambedkar, a founder leader of India’s militant neo-Buddhists.

I met one “serious” hijacker recently in a makeshift prison in occupied Kashmir, where he was distributing copies of his memoirs to visiting journalists while official guards at the high security jail offered generous rounds of Pepsi Cola with freshly baked pastries to the guests.

If luck stays with him and a little more help from Indian intelligence agencies that are believed to be helping him with one of their mysterious agendas, Hashim Qureshi could be the next chief minister of occupied Kashmir, or so his colleagues say.

Qureshi’s leader in the 1971 hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane to Lahore, Maqbool Butt, was hanged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail after about a decade of incarceration. I met Maqbool Butt too, but only some years after he was captured and turned into a vegetable. He wore unwashed prison pyjamas. His shaved head tumbled from side to side on his skinny shoulders and he had a blank look in his eyes when he tried to speak. That was India’s first hijacking and it was a serious affair. In a way it signalled the beginning of the violent upsurge against New Delhi’s rule in the Himalayan region.

A copy of the bail application Qureshi gave me conveys something of a clue to his story. A paragraph reads: “Perusal of file reveals that after the commission of the alleged offence, the case registered on 30-1-1971 could not be concluded and was closed as the accused were in Pakistan where, as per the present accused, he was arrested, tried, jailed and later released. Thereafter, he went to Holland and settled there and could be arrested only on 29-12-2000 by immigration authorities at Indira Gandhi Airport while on his way from Holland to Nepal and was handed over to state police. The case was re-opened and investigation commenced, which concluded with institution of foregoing allegations.”

Whether Hashim Qureshi is ever released again or not into the sprawling wilds of Indian politics, he told me something that I have not been able to confirm. He said India had quietly released the four or five Sikh hijackers who had commandeered another Indian Airlines plane to Lahore in 1984 before surrendering in Dubai. Indian officials had claimed at that time that the hijackers were given a pistol at Lahore which they didn’t have when the hijacking began from Chandigarh, capital of Punjab. The accusations led to a tense standoff between India and Pakistan.

The last hijacking in India was the second hijacking related to Delhi’s Kashmir dispute. It was also India’s first hijacking as a nuclear power. Pro-Pakistan militants commandeered flight IC 814 on its way from Kathmandu to Delhi on Dec 25, 1999. The hardline Hindu nationalist government, which had sniggered at the previous Congress party administration’s handling of some more than a dozen hijackings and terrorist attacks since 1971, was in a quandary. It had to ask pet hate Pakistan for help, a nation it accuses of harbouring terrorists and hijackers, to allow the plane to land in Lahore.

Something worse happened for post-nuclear almighty India. In a move that seriously embarrassed his own party, the hardline tough-talking foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, met all of the hijackers’ demands. He even accompanied Maulana Masood Azhar and two other militant leaders to Kandahar to hand them over to the Taliban regime. Look at the irony. The fanatical Azhar was captured in 1994 by a non-nuclear state and set free by a nuclear nation! So much for prowess.

There was yet more linen to be washed publicly. Criticizing the Congress for its statement on the government’s decision to release three militants, a government minister said the latter cared for the lives and security of the innocent people who could not be left at the mercy of the hijackers.

The minister recalled that the Janata Dal government had released five militants for only one captive, Rubiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Besides, it had also released five militants for an engineer held hostage by terrorists.

Earlier, the Congress government had released 40 militants in the Charar-i-Sharif episode. “The Vajpayee government released only three militants for rescuing 154 innocent persons,” the Bharatiya Janata Party minister had gloated.

It is clear from some of the examples above that India’s approach to fighting hijackers and terrorists has been tentative, if not completely laughable. The global coalition against terrorism could be an opportunity for the country to join a serious attempt to make itself truly strong against mindless violence, particular one that targets innocent civilians.

When US Secretary of State Colin Powell comes calling this week, the country could chalk out a plan with him about one or two concrete steps to fight terrorism, as opposed to playing divisive politics with its minorities. Powell’s more important agenda during the tour comes after his visit to India and Pakistan, when he goes to Shanghai to attend the APEC foreign ministers’ conference. Now everybody and their neighbours know that President George W. Bush has also agreed to go to the APEC summit in Shanghai, not to pursue the group’s usual economic agenda, but to use it as a platform to weld together important partners that are not members of the US-led Western alliances, to tackle global terrorism.

Powell has already indicated in his Newsweek musings that he needs China and Russia, both APEC members, as a main bulwark against the global scourge battle. He also wants India and Pakistan to use the opportunity to work out a more stable future for the region. As it happens, almost all Asian countries that are members of APEC, including Japan and Vietnam, have been visited by the problems of hijackings and terrorist attacks. The problem is not India’s alone.

The APEC summit will also look at the progress made by the Shanghai Five in their quest to neutralize terrorism around Afghanistan as it existed before Sept 11. Sooner than later both India and Pakistan could be asked to come and join the discussions and share and benefit from each other’s experience with terror. And if a few people from the august gathering look amused by some of India’s experiences, New Delhi should have the sense of humour to smile.

Held hostage by alien hands: KARACHI FILE

THIS city is no stranger to strikes that bring about total stoppage of normal life. There was a time when the MQM could get the people to halt all work at a wink. That kind of strike was a strong political statement. So frequent and ‘complete’ those strikes used to be that the MQM generalissimo had earned the sobriquet ‘Hartal Husain.’ That was largely because most people agreed with the political content, even if some most definitely didn’t.

Friday’s strike was a pretty different kettle of fish. It had no political connotation. Indeed it was as apolitical an event as one could imagine. All political parties stayed out of it. Some had openly opposed the strike idea, having come out in support of the line taken by President Pervez Musharraf on the Afghan issue.

As the media said, ‘religious parties’ had called the shutdown. For his part, US President Bush had said that he was calling a halt to the air strikes in consideration of the sanctity that the Muslims attached to Friday. For our part we, the wonderful Muslims that we are by the grace of God, had a very different way of showing respect to the holy day that Friday is for us.

We burst into the streets, shut down schools and colleges, disrupted life, put food shops on fire, broke into banks, blocked roads, burnt vehicles and tyres, exchanged violent compliments with police, under clouds of teargas and sporadic bursts of gunfire. It was such fun all day long on Friday, our Jumatul Mubarak, if you please.

We are told that the strike in Karachi was ‘complete.’ Meaning thereby that all meaningful activity had been halted. Nothing moved except the flag-waving, slogan-shouting Madressa alumni, loosely called the Taliban. Police played their part strictly according to the script, chasing the protesters, beating up a few here and there, out of habit and without any discrimination. By the end of the day the city had witnessed some dispiriting exhibitions of inexcusably bad street manners, exaggerated to the verge of downright criminal conduct. All of this added up to unmitigated brigandage.

The truth about the mayhem of last Friday must be told. Never mind if it sounds very unpleasant to some ears. A vast majority of the youths agitating were not permanent residents of this city. Their bearing, dress and manners were alien to what is native to this city. Karachi is Pakistan on a relatively smaller scale. All the noise and fury of last Friday had the stamp of the north-west, not excluding the country beyond the faded Durand Line. It was not Karachi that was on strike. You could say it was a city strike-bound.

Many of us were reminded of the (un) wisdom and (lack of) vision of dictator Zia’s ISI that had dreamed of extending Pakistan’s reach to beyond Central Asia, via Kabul. The ground reality today is that a good deal of Kabul is in Karachi, and kicking furiously. These turbaned young gentlemen, parading under the label of some ‘defence committee,’ had thought of the strike Tamasha, and we saw it staged by them to nobody’s amusement in Karachi.

Why the strike was such a complete shutdown? Not because the people of Karachi wanted to take a day off. This is a city as close to a workaholic society as there be anywhere in the world. It is all about work, wage, profit, investment and — again the same process, on and on and on...Shopkeepers do not set up shop to shut it down at the drop of a hat.

For the taxi-driver and the bus operator work stoppage is starvation. Strike is dead loss to the factory-owner, as it is to the factory worker. For the day worker, a day without work is a day without bread. How come then Karachi was brought to a dead stop for nothing that the people of Karachi would put their money on? If the shutdown was complete it was not because people wanted a strike or were happy to stop work.

Life in Karachi is saturated with violence. For the citizen, the risk of taking the car out on a ‘strike’ day is too much of a risk to be taken. For the bus operator, the risk is much greater. The shopkeeper would be offering windowpanes and showcases to the street urchins’ brickbats. Experience warns against relying upon police for protection against the street vandals. Karachi now lives on the sufferance of the violent criminal.

On whose side is police? You would need enormous optimism to be sure it is on your side. Lessons learned about life in this city forbid trusting the minions of law. If the situation were otherwise, anything like last Friday’s complete work stoppage would be absolutely out of the question. Every citizen in Karachi has a stake in work. Interruption in the work cycle is total negation of Karachi psyche and culture.

A complete strike on a political non-issue simply means a Karachi scared stiff by the vandals on the prowl. This fear is lack of trust in the government’s promise to protect the law-abiding citizen against the criminal. On the eve of the Friday strike, tough proclamations were made from Islamabad, ordering the law-enforcing agencies to deal sternly with any attempt to disrupt normal life. Those strong words notwithstanding, Karachi was virtually knocked down by the Taliban who are, by all reckoning, strangers to Karachi, if not complete aliens to this city.

Programme for health care needed: COMMENT

SOME stress is a necessary part of life, but too much of it can result in a wide range of ailments and disorders. Fortunately, there are early warning signs that can tell you when something is wrong. The concept of mental health will show you how to recognize the physical, mental and emotional symptoms of too much stress, so that you can take action before it leads to a serious illness.

For a long time people were unaware that their thoughts and actions had any relation to their health. Today even the medical profession is beginning to acknowledge the body-mind connection. At present we have many disease-care programmes but very few for health care. We are being taught how to handle a disease rather than how to promote health and awareness among the masses. A good health-care plan would include education. A whole programme of heath-care education could be launched at the government level.

It is crucial to remember that whatever we think and say become our experience. There are many reasons why we might benefit from working on our mental health. Most important of them is our ability to handle new challenges.

Mental health is a matter of great concern, with important implications for the individual, as well as for society. Our thoughts and words are constantly shaping our world and our experiences. The problem is in accepting the fact that we are faced with a dilemma.

It is important to remember that doctors usually refer physical and mental health in negative terms as the absence of disease, illness and sickness. But how easy it is to get guidance on what really influences mental health. By this I don’t mean tips on relaxation or seeing a counsellor or psychotherapist. I am rather mean the advice that you can follow yourself and which really can make a difference to your long-term mental health.

When the World Health Organization emphasizes that health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, let us view some signposts of true mental health.

“Constructive attitude towards the self.” Accept your capabilities and limitations. Self-confidence, self-esteem and self-respect suggest a more positive attitude to yourself than mere acceptance.

Integration of personality means you do not hold such attitudes as are in abrasive conflict with each other.

The solution is some kind of balance between our internal forces, leaving us with the flexibility to be aggressive or passionate as the need arises, and to be in control and calm when required. Moreover, most mental health problems relate to events which are very much part of our everyday life and which are very difficult to avoid. Mental health and social behaviour are also interlinked; normal behaviour in one country might be considered abnormal in the other.

The reason doctors find it easier to recognize and agree on illness than on health is that by the time you have got so ill as to think about seeing a doctor, you are in a state which is so unpleasant that there is little doubt that this is undesirable and should be reversed.

Pain is always our personality’s resistance to new growth. We are all very resistant to change, because we are not very trusting that, ultimately, life is working perfectly and we are exactly where we need to be, experiencing exactly what we need to, in order to grow and evolve into our full potential as a wondrous being in a magnificent universe. We are always in a process of positive growth.

Events in our lives are only experiences. Our experiences are not our identity or our self-worth. We do not want to focus attention on the experience. For instance, we do not want to say: “I am a failure,” but rather, “I have had the experience of failure, and I am now in recovery.” Growth is just changing the way we look at things.

Life is a learning process. We are here to learn and to grow. Not knowing is not a crime. Not knowing is simply ignorance or lack of understanding. So we don’t want to judge ourselves or others for not knowing. Life will always be larger-than-our ability to grasp it. We are all in a process of learning, growing and gaining more understanding. Yet, we ‘will never “know it all.”

Getting still and going within helps us to find the answers we need for this time in our lives. When we ask for assistance or even call for help, it is our inner self that responds.

These explanations are crucial in increasing the mental health. They will determine how much you believe you can control your future and this, in turn, leads to a positive sense of self- efficacy, or personal control. People with positive self-efficacy believe they succeed in the end, no matter how often they have failed in the past.

A positive mental health strategy is to be realistic about the likelihood of suffering and the many unfortunate and unpredictable negative life events, which upset the average citizen. Be grateful if you have so far not experienced these, but do not assume they will never happen to you.

Every age has its special challenges and unique stresses. To live happily and healthily, new strategies for coping with stress need to be learned and previous ones modified at each stage.

Research has found that poor parenting in childhood is linked to an increased risk of depression as well as, to a lesser extent, anxiety in adult life. This might appear to reinforce the argument that the best prevention strategies for disorders where there are strong continuities between childhood and adult problems are those which target parenting practices.

Once children reach their teens, young people must balance the need to develop, apart from their families, with the desire to retain their childhood security. Teens are pressured to conform with their peers, to perform well at school and to meet the challenges of becoming competent in an adult world.

The sheer scale of the mental health problem means that, logically, prevention should be at the top of the agenda. But acknowledging this is one thing, implementing it another. Even the experts acknowledge that there could never be enough clinicians to treat everyone who requires help and some have even advocated the idea that non-clinicians, such as teachers, should be recruited to fill the gap.

I believe instead that it is the general public who should be recruited to help themselves. This seems much more likely to achieve the aim of prevention, for the simple reason that no matter how much dedicated the professionals may be, no one has as much interest in your own mental health as yourself.

Salvation’s Army?

FEAR gripped the hearts and minds of all faithful who went out to pray or to run an errand, as smoke rose from the debris of burning tyres in centre-streets across Karachi. Barricades went up to block access to all roads that led to a western foreign mission or a diplomat’s residence. Shattered pieces of glass lay at many crossroads as a result of angry mob pelting stones at the passing vehicles. The muezzin called the faithful to prayer, echoing a full-throated haiyya a’l-al-falah — ‘come to salvation’. The call fell on many a deaf ear that day. It was another Jumat-ul-Mubarak, the “blessed” Friday that saw bunches of zealous followers of a religion, that can only be translated as peace, wage war of hate, anger and destruction against their own people. In the words of the American scholar, Imam Hamza Yusuf, “Islam was hijacked on September 11, 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim.”

The next disturbing question: Who will rescue Islam from the hijackers? Certainly not the Bushes, Blairs, Mulla Omars and the Osamas of the world, because they are all party to the crime. A religion that means peace and doesn’t distinguish between individual and collective social responsibility deserves some respect. And so do its followers.

Let Karachi not be held hostage to these war-mongering zealots. The residents of this metropolis need to feel secure and safe so that they can carry on with their lives. The government should send out the troops on the streets to ensure that businesses stay open — like it has done in Islamabad — if that is what it takes. The vast majority in Karachi, just like anywhere else in the country, wants to get to work in order to bring back the daily bread and butter to their families.

For the multitude of the city’s over 12 million inhabitants, the daily jihad to keep their children fed and clothed is the real war that they have to wage to sustain their freedom to live. It is their operation “Enduring Freedom” for which they pay a heavy price on a daily basis. Pakistan is one lucky country to be home to such resilient people, who expect little favours in return for their struggle to survive. The least the law can do is to guarantee their right to live and work in peace in these critical times.

The government departments are supposed to have mastered the art of maintaining those records which remain unchanged. Our municipalities have many such documents which, at a random glance, leave one with an impression that Karachi is far from the heaven it is portrayed to be.

There is a record room on the second floor of the defunct KMC head quarters which is home to more than 140-year-old records but unfortunately it lies in a pathetic state. The room, when opened, has a foul odour emanating from it making the task of searching for any file more difficult. Most of the files have been ruined by termites, while many have been partially lost. Officials say, “This record room is supposed to be maintained by the Land Department as the city’s land-owning documents are kept here.”

“I am the only person alive who can track down old records,” an elderly Land Department clerk says. Many of the files maintained hold old records despite changes in the location or status of the buildings. Several files pertaining to churches or temples or green pastures exist when such sites do not anymore.

This miserable condition has encouraged a land mafia to grow in cahoots with certain Land Department officials. Many precious buildings and plots have fallen to these mafia's hands. In certain cases, the municipal authorities have taken legal action but on most occasions they lost the cases simply due to lack of adequate records.

“We had plans to computerize our land records in the past but it could not materialize because of financial restraints and hectic official procedures,” says a senior city government official. “This plan is still on the cards but I don’t know how much time it will take.”

Last Monday saw some riots in the Jama Cloth Market area where police had to use force to stop anti-American protestors from destroying property in the area. The following day a colleague went to the area to speak to shop keepers to get their views on the incident. Surprisingly, almost all the shops were open but it was not business as usual as there were hardly any customers, a worrying aspect for these small business owners. “What do we have to do with this war,” asked Afzal, a man who runs a small embroidery service. “I’m frightened that these people will start forcing us to shut down our shops to show support for them. I do not care for politics. I have children to feed and every day’s business counts.”

Another shop keeper, Yunus, had an interesting anecdote to share. It seems that while the police were trying to curb the protestors (read baton-charge), onlookers joined in on the beatings, telling the Afghan refugees to go home. “One minute we were watching the police beating them and then other people joined in with the police. The police seemed thrilled to have support from the public,” he said.

Jamil who was present at the scene said, “This was the first time I was on the police’s side. It doesn't matter whether America is right or wrong, or even if Pakistan is right or wrong; you can’t just disrupt lives.”

The Soroptimist Club held a seminar last week at a five star hotel to discuss depression in women, and offered ways to cope with it.

Dr Niaz, an eminent psychiatrist who is a strong advocate of counseling spoke of the need for wome