When Jaishankar came to know that his father was also on the hijacked plane, he narrated the story in Geneva

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar shared an experience from his early days as an officer in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in 1984, when he learnt that his father was also on board a plane that had been hijacked just a few minutes ago. Jaishankar said he realised this only when he called his mother.

Jaishankar’s father K. Subrahmanyam later played an important role in shaping India’s nuclear policy. He emphasized on the policy of ‘No First Use’ and the capability of second attack.

Father was on the hijacked plane

Speaking to the Indian community in Geneva, Switzerland, Jaishankar recalled the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 421 in 1984. He was dealing with it as an officer but he came to know that his father was among the 79 passengers on board the plane.

Jaishankar was a young officer in 1984 and was part of the team that dealt with the plane hijacking. He joined the IFS in 1979. His father Krishnaswamy Subramaniam was a leading analyst of international strategic affairs, a journalist and a former civil servant.

Jaishankar called his mother

Jaishankar recalled the moment when he came to know about his father’s presence in the plane. He said, ‘Four hours after the hijacking, I came to know that my father was in that plane.’ He told that this information put him in a strange situation between the official response and the personal concerns of his family.

He said, ‘My wife was working and was out. I could not go to my son, who was barely a few months old then. I called my mother and told her that a hijack had happened and I could not come home.’ Jaishankar said, ‘On the one hand, I was part of the team working on the hijack, on the other hand, I was part of the family that was pressurizing the government. I was in a strange situation.’

K Subramaniam needed insulin shots

On August 24, 1984, Indian Airlines Flight 421 was hijacked by seven members of the banned All India Sikh Students Federation. The regional jetliner, flying from Delhi to Srinagar, had its first stopover in Chandigarh. The hijackers hijacked the flight without any weapons.

Before landing in Dubai, the plane first went to Lahore, then to Karachi. When the flight landed in Dubai, negotiations began with the active participation of the then Defense Minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The passengers had to wait for 14 hours in the flight in the scorching heat of Dubai.

Then Jaishankar’s father, K Subrahmanyam, the then director of the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) and suffering from diabetes, needed urgent insulin shots.

The hijackers put pressure on K. Subramaniam

In the scorching heat of Dubai, two ambulances approached the plane and K. Subramaniam was taken to one of the ambulances along with a hijacker. After K. Subramaniam returned to the plane, the hijackers asked him to put pressure on the negotiating officers. They said that they would start killing one passenger every half an hour.

However, the situation did not deteriorate and negotiations were soon successful. All the passengers were rescued in this hijack that lasted for 36 hours. The hijackers accepted defeat and were later extradited to India to face trial.