Spy Games

Through many a success and setback, R&AW has come a long way

- R. Prasannan

Hashim Qureshi hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in January 1971 to Lahore, sent the passengers by road to India, and blew up the plane. Since Pakistan foreign minister Z.A. Bhutto had met him during the hostage negotiations, India alleged that the Pakistan government was behind the hijack, and banned overflight by Pakistani aircraft over Indian territory. Pakistan denied the charge, tried Qureshi and sent him to jail. On his release in 1980, he fled to the Netherlands. When he returned to India in 2000, he was arrested. Now, human rights lawyers have contested that a person cannot be tried twice for the same offence. Qureshi is now in Srinagar; the case is pending.

Now, R.K. Yadav, a former R&AW officer, has said in his book Mission R&AW that Qureshi was a R&AW agent (Qureshi has denied it and sued Yadav), and that the whole hijack was stage-managed by R&AW’s founder-boss R.N. Kao to find an excuse to ban overflight of Pakistani military cargo planes from West Pakistan to East Pakistan. The ban forced Pakistani pilots to fly all the way around the Indian peninsula via Sri Lanka, thus effectively choking Pakistani military logistic supplies. No wonder, the Indian Army had a walkover in the Bangladesh war 11 months later. If it was a R&AW operation, it was, perhaps, one of the best executed ones in the history of espionage.