Shooting in dark: India hostage to security crisis?

GUNS AND POSES: The Army used risky and bloody option but that was the only one it had.

      

Featured Blog

Rajdeep Sardesai

Maharaj or Dada, Ganguly's legacy lives on

Featured Slideshows

Three terrorists holed up inside a house in Chinore near Jammu were killed in a gunfight with the security forces on Wednesday night.

The terrorists took seven persons hostage on Wednesday morning and shot dead three others before being killed in a 20-hour security operation during which the sound of machine guns and exploding grenades rang the air.

The Army had two options during the hostage crisis: breach the single-story house the terrorists had taken over or wait and wear them out.

The Army didn’t have the specialised weapons to confront the terrorists without harming the hostages. It couldn’t have brought the house down without harming the hostages, so it had to go for the option of wearing out the terrorists and waiting for them to exhaust their ammunition. The second option was risky and bloody but it was all the Army had.

Was the Army handicapped? Are we ill equipped to deal with hostage crisis situation? CNN-IBN’s Bhupendra Chaubey asked this on Face The Nation.

The guests on the show were Saibal Kar, a passenger on Indian Airlines flight IC 814 which was hijacked and taken to Kandahar in 1999, Brig (retd.) Gurmeet Kanwal, director of Centre for Land Warfare Studies, and Steven Herman, South Asia Bureau Chief of Voice of America.

Kar said the situation in Kandahar and Chinore were different. “There was scope of negotiation with the plane’s hijackers but the terrorists on Wednesday just wanted to kill as many people before being killed. We (IC 814 passengers) never thought we come out alive; we all know how botched that rescue operation was,” he said.

Kanwal said the security operation was the “best way” to rescue the hostages. “The aim was that the hostages don’t come to harm; the terrorists are tired out and then go in at the dead of the night,” he said.

India has an embarrassing record of giving in to kidnappers: the country’s Foreign Minister took four terrorists in his plane to Kandahar in return of the safe release of IC 814 passengers in December 1999.

Years before that, in December 1989, the Central government released five terrorists to secure the release of Rubaiya Sayeed, the kidnapped daughter of Kashmiri politician Mufti Mohammad Sayeed.