CRISIS MANAGEMENT: THE WAKE-UP CALL
The War Book lays down the drill to be followed by the political leadership, the armed
forces and the civilian bureaucracy when war breaks out. There are separate drills for
crisis management in peacetime and for natural disaster management.
These drills, laid down by the British, have been updated
periodically, to deal with new situations such as hostage-taking, hijacking etc. Rajiv
Gandhi took an active interest in having these drills updated, rehearsed and tested often.
During his visit to Bhopal after the gas tragedy (1984), he was
greatly concerned to notice that neither the local administration nor the factory
management had any laid-down drill to deal with such a disaster, if it occurred. They had
presumed, on the basis of the assurances by the factory management, that such a disaster
was unlikely. To remove the inadequacies, he set up a special cell in the Ministry of Home
Affairs headed by an officer of Secretary's rank.
Other Prime Ministers since 1947 did not evince the same interest
in this subject, which was again neglected by those who succeeded him.
Crisis management is partly operational, partly psychological and
partly political. The operational aspect deals with the nuts and bolts steps such as
collection of intelligence inputs, their analysis, preparation of a strategy to deal with
the crisis on the basis of past experience and new inputs, mobilising the forces and
equipment that may be required for implementing it, an analysis of the various options
available to the political leadership etc.
The psychological aspect relates to keeping up the morale of the
public and the relatives of the victims or likely victims of the crisis, with the
co-operation of the media.
The political aspect deals with the mobilisation of domestic and
international support for the Government's efforts to deal with the crisis.
There are three types of hijack situations: an Indian aircraft is
hijacked anywhere in the world; a foreign plane is hijacked in Indian airspace; and a
foreign aircraft is hijacked in foreign airspace and the terrorists force the pilot to
take it to an Indian airport.
In the first instance, the pilot is encouraged to land the
aircraft in an Indian airport so that the crisis management is totally within our control
in our territory. In the other two instances, the pilot is encouraged to take the aircraft
to the country to which the airline company belongs so that the crisis management becomes
the responsibility of that country unless landing in an Indian airport becomes necessary
on humanitarian grounds (e.g.: the plane running dangerously short of fuel).
Hijacking management drill has five components, relatives
management, media management, aircraft management, hijacker management and ultimately, if
unavoidable, commando operation.
The relatives and media management has to be handled at a senior
level to reassure the relatives that the political leadership and senior security
bureaucracy share their concerns and anxieties and have been dealing with the crisis
vigorously and to ensure that the media exercises restraint in its coverage in order not
to give undue publicity (the "terrorists' oxygen", as Mrs.Margaret Thatcher, the
former British Prime Minister, called it) to the hijackers and not to demoralise the
relatives by disseminating alarming stories of the terrorists' past record of ruthlessness
etc.
Indian Airlines have had 13 hijackings, but one had never
witnessed before the type of violent protests from the relatives as one saw recently. This
was partly due to the mushrooming of private TV channels and many of them exceeding the
limits of the advisable in their oneupmanship and partly to the failure of the crisis
management team and the political leadership to pay attention to these psychological
aspects for two days.
The aim of aircraft management is to ensure that the aircraft
remains in our territory or, if there are exceptional circumstances making this
impossible, it is kept in an airport in a friendly territory to facilitate hijacker
management, through psychological pressure and persuasion, if possible, and through
commando action, if necessary.
There could be legitimate reasons for our inability to have the
plane detained at Amritsar (initial reports of the pilot about the hijackers having AK-47
and other heavy weapons and killing four passengers in their desperation), but no valid
reason has been forthcoming for our failure to have the aircraft detained at Dubai, with
the help of the local authorities. Once we let the aircraft reach Kandahar, we lost our
ability to control its movement.
Hijacker management focuses on psychological pressure on the
hijackers and their organisations and instigators by mobilising world opinion against them
and immediate start of negotiations with them, in order to try to terminate the crisis
without the use of commandos, if possible, and to give the commandos time to collect and
study intelligence inputs and prepare themselves, if their intervention becomes necessary.
In hijacker management, the psychological advantage is almost
totally with our crisis management team if the aircraft is in our territory, only
partially, but still in a large measure with us if the aircraft is in a friendly foreign
territory and almost totally with the hijackers and their sponsors if the hijackers manage
to take the aircraft to unfriendly territory. This is what happened at Kandahar.
Commando operations in one's own territory are generally
successful and less costly in human terms. Our own intervention forces have a commendable
record in this regard.
Successful commando operations in foreign territory depend on the
co-operation of the security forces of the country in which the aircraft is detained and,
if this not possible, our ability to mount a clandestine raid, rescue the hostages and
take them out before the security forces of the other country have time to intervene.
There have been only four instances of commando operations in
foreign territory--one each by Israel (Entebbe-1976) and West Germany (Mogadishu-late
1970s) which were successful with the minimum acceptable human costs and two by Egypt of
which one (Malta-1985) was successful, but at tremendous human cost (59 passengers killed)
and the other (Cyprus-1978) a disaster, with the commandos being mowed down by the local
security forces.
In authorising a commando operation in an unfriendly foreign
territory, the political leadership has the unenviable task of calculating the acceptable
human costs of various options and selecting the best of the options. In Kandahar, we were
without any option because of our inadequate local knowledge, our strained relations with
the Taliban leadership and the fact that whichever route the commando aircraft took, it
would have had to fly over the territory of an Islamic country.
It was very unlikely that they would have given clearance for
overflying their territory and, even if they did, there was a danger of leakage of
information to the hijackers through pro-Pakistan elements in their security machinery.
Thus, the Govt. was left with no other option but to compromise
with the terrorists and it has made the best of a thankless job.
Our lethargic natural disaster management during the Orissa
cyclone and equally unsatisfactory initial response to the hijacking crisis show serious
inadequacies in our ability to prevent a crisis and to deal with it effectively, if it
occurs in spite of our preventive measures.
The Kandahar experience should make all of us apprehensive over
our ability to deal promptly and effectively with disasters and crises of even a more
serious nature such as a nuclear accident, for example.
If we fail to draw the right lessons from Kandahar and carry on
as if there is nothing wrong with our crisis and natural disaster management, we could be
in for a much more nasty surprise in the future.
B.RAMAN
(6-1-00)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,
Chennai.
E-Mail:corde@vsnl.com).
