IA Airbus hijack — SP, NCP blast Vajpayee Govt

CALCUTTA, JAN 3: Samajwadi Party on Monday charged the Vajpayee Government with ``compromising'' with national security by releasing three...

CALCUTTA, JAN 3: Samajwadi Party on Monday charged the Vajpayee Government with “compromising” with national security by releasing three terrorists and said that India would be treated as a `soft state’.

Commenting on the government action to secure the release of the hostages aboard Indian Airlines flight IC 814, the party general secretary Amar Singh told PTI here that this would also encourage the terrorists to indulge in more such acts.

Stating that India has failed on diplomatic front as well, Singh said that the Government should have tried to put international pressure to secure the release of the hostages.

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The SP leader said that despite information that Pakistani ISI was very active in Nepal, the Government did not take any measures to check such incidents. The Vajpayee government, he said, would have to answer as to what actually transpired in Amritsar airport when the hijacked plane landed for some time.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) demanded a white paper on the hijackof the Indian Airlines plane and mooted setting up of a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to go into the country’s "combat readiness" when a situation like this arises.

"The government must come forward with a white paper on the crisis to reassure people that what happened was an aberration and that Government is readying itself to face any challenge to national security," NCP spokesman D N Dwivedi told reporters.

Stating that the incident had caused a deep sense of "disquiet and discomfort" among the people about the kind of danger the nation faced at the beginning of the new century, he said the haunting questions were what price did the country pay and whether the government acquitted itself with honour.

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Dwivedi felt the entire operation had shown the government in a "very poor light" and apprehended terrorists might target security establishments to demoralise the armed forces.