New Delhi: India Thursday set in motion one of its largest evacuation operations to bring back 15,000 citizens from 12 countries via 64 Air India flights. While this pandemic-fueled evacuation — from 7 to 13 May — is set to be one of world’s largest, it isn’t the first time that the Indian government has conducted a mega evacuation exercise.
Three decades earlier, more than 1 lakh Indians were brought back from the Gulf over 63 days and via 488 Air India flights when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. This has been the single largest incident of civilian air lift in world history until now.
It was the time when a wobbly Indian government, held together by a fragile coalition between the Janata Dal, Left and the Bharatiya Janata Party ruled Delhi.
India then also had far lesser economic and diplomatic resources – forcing it to manoeuvre the tricky terrain of Iraqi, Kuwaiti and US politics – all intended to finally bring back its citizens home.
What made the exercise more challenging were the inherent complexities in planning and enforcing such a large evacuation in a tricky operational environment.
“Evacuating citizens from abroad is an extremely complex mission in which distance, logistics, security, and coordination pose numerous obstacles,” writes Constantino Xavier of Brookings India, who has researched India’s expatriate evacuation operations.
ThePrint looks at what the 1990 Kuwait and Iraq civilian airlift was all about.
Also read: Asymptomatic Indians cleared by UAE health authorities to fly back from 7 May: Embassy
Getting diplomacy right
On 2 August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. Soon, the Kuwaiti royal family and the country’s top government officials fled to Saudi Arabia, practically leaving the capital Kuwait City under Iraqi occupation.
On the same day, Kuwaiti ruler Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah also left for Saudi. K.P. Fabian, who was then the joint secretary (Gulf) at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), received an urgent phone call from India’s then Ambassador to Kuwait A.K. Budhiraja, informing him about the Iraqi invasion.
With 1,76,000 Indians stranded in the region, their safety became India’s immediate concern. Soon began India’s global political endeavor to bring back its stranded citizens home.
As a US-led attack on Iraq was imminent, the MEA had two plans in mind. It could either convince the US to not attack Kuwait, thus ensuring the safety of India’s expatriates, or convince the leadership in both Kuwait and Iraq to let India bring back its citizens.
I.K. Gujral, then the foreign minister, was sent to Washington under the guise of attending the United Nations General Assembly in order to convince US to withdraw its decision of attacking Iraq. This was a long shot to begin with, and Gujral failed.
New Delhi then moved to its plan B. With India’s condemnation of the Iraqi invasion comparatively toned down, the next step was to convince the exiled Kuwaiti leadership that it wanted to bring its citizens back home.
“Chinmaya Gharekhan, India’s permanent representative to the UN, advocated joining the rest of the world to ‘condemn’ the invasion, but the government pointedly chose the softer ‘deplore’ to describe its reaction,” notes a report in Ozy.
While Kuwait accepted India’s decision, convincing Hussein was harder.
On 20 August 1990, Gujral and Fabian reached Iraq. They met Hussein who was wearing “traditional khaki uniform with a gun in his holster”, according to Gujral’s autobiography Matters of Discretion. “He hugged me when I went to greet him,” wrote Gujral.
But this meeting led to an international controversy. Images of the belligerent Iraqi leader hugging India’s foreign minister were broadcasted globally, putting India in an awkward situation.
Fabian, however, defended Gujral. “When your host wants to embrace you, you can’t avoid it.”
The Gujral-Hussein meeting went well, and the Iraqi leader promised his cooperation. India’s largest civilian evacuation operation was underway.
Planning airlifts
There are usually several stages of planning before an evacuation operation actually takes place. According to Xavier, it involves three stages.
The first stage is about assessing the risks. This involves inter-ministerial coordination, inputs from foreign missions and making an assessment about the operational environment.
Second stage is about the actual planning. Beyond providing consular support to expatriates “government officials need to decide whether to call for a civilian airlift or a military-led operation,” writes Xavier.
Third stage is the operational phase and involves the actual execution of an evacuation. “Expatriates have to be contacted and directed to secure assembling points for prescreening. A direct communication link must be established between the operational headquarters and officials on the ground, including military assets and other neighbouring control centers in the crisis region,” notes Xavier.
Indian authorities at the time had to undergo each of these three stages. While the country had conducted six similar operations in the past, it was yet to execute something this large.
The initial part of the operation, not surprisingly, was marked with ad-hocism, bureaucratic confusions and logistical issues.
Fabian has said how prioritising evacuees was initially left to Gujral, who began distributing his business cards to individuals as passes to fly out of Kuwait on a priority basis.
The Indian government had initially thought of using military aircraft to execute the operation.
“A few military flights were arranged at first, with leaders in the Indian community working with the embassy to pick out the infirm, elderly, women and children to fly back. But once they had all returned to India, the government realised that military transport – which is much more cumbersome because of air space clearances – would not do the job,” notes a report in Scroll.
A decision was made to use Air India. The MEA was then the nodal agency for coordinating this entire effort, right from talking with the civil aviation ministry and its missions in Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan.
Also read: Don’t blame Covid or financial package. Politics is holding India’s migrant workers hostage
Executing the airlifts
The MEA had initially assessed that not all Indians might need to be evacuated, so only a fewer number of flights were dispatched.
But Kuwait City was under Iraqi occupation and the Indian diaspora felt increasingly insecure. This forced the Indian government to scale up the size of its evacuation operation overnight.
But there was another problem. Because of resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council, India could not operate civilian flights out of Iraq and Kuwait. All stranded Indians needed to be transported – moving across borders – to Amman in Jordan, from where they would be brought back home.
A procedure was put into place. Buses were arranged for people to come to Amman. Then, given the number of Indians waiting there, a proportionate number of flights were dispatched from New Delhi.
A seamless coordination between MEA and the civil aviation ministry ensured this process went on smoothly. “The important thing was that thanks to the excellent rapport between the MEA and Civil Aviation Ministry, we did not waste time in routine writing of notes,” Fabian wrote.
“For example, if there was a message from our Embassy in Amman that there were four thousand evacuees, all that I had to do was to make a call to the Secretary or the Joint Secretary concerned in the Civil Aviation Ministry. I could be sure that the necessary number of planes would leave in hours,” he added.
Air India saves the day
Over 63 days, 1,10,000 out of the 1,70,000 stranded Indians in Iraq and Kuwait were finally brought back via 488 Air India flights. The event was the basis for the 2016 movie Airlift starring Akshay Kumar.
Ever since the evacuation in 1990, Air India has been lauded for playing a significant role in the largest civilian airlift in human history. The staff and crew members of the Indian flyer had to work under stringent conditions.
“You should have seen us. We were operating out of a hotel room in Amman with very little space and carrying out all our operations from there. We had very little assistance from the embassy, other than issuing passports, but we had very good relations with the local authorities, who helped us,” said M.P. Mascarenhas, who organised the operation, as the airline’s regional director in the Gulf & Middle East.
An incident involving the Air India staff has also been recounted by Fabian. “I had gone to Amman and was at breakfast when a grim looking Manuel, the Air India manager, came and sat next to me,” he wrote.
An Air India crew had refused to embark an aircraft going back owing to delays. The staff complained that boarding it would mean they would have been on duty for more than 24 hours.
Fabian wrote on how he managed to find a way around this situation. He called his friend Firdous Khergamwala, a former Indian Foreign Service officer, and the then Gulf correspondent for The Hindu.
“I told him to carry a story about Air India: When the nation is facing an emergency, Air India has risen up to the challenge; the passengers may come one hour or seven hours late, but the crew receives them with a graceful smile; the crew may have to put in 16 or 19 hours at a stretch, but they were more than willing… All of us, those in the government and the civil society, have to learn from Air India,” wrote Fabian.
The story was done and the next day, Manuel again visited Fabian on the breakfast table to inform him that the flight to India was about to take off. Manuel said his crew had told him that they would never again walk out on him again.
Also read: Like an MEA to help NRIs in crisis, India needs a system for its internal migrants too
From the first day of the evacuation to the last day there were only 4 Air India staff who stayed permanently in Amman running traffic operations . Thw rest of the staff kept rotating every 1 week and used to come India. The operations were headed by Mr Michael P Mascarenhas and Mr C M Manuel. Out of that only 2 people are still alive – Mr Michael P Macarenhas, then RD, who later became CMD and Mr George M George, Air India staff from Kuwait. Mr C M Manuel and Capt Nair passed away. Mr Gujral after visiting Iraq went to Kuwait and met all the elite Indians and VIPs living in Kuwait and flew back to Delhi with them and their baggage.
I can give a detailed story of the operations in Amman.
– George M George.
Very impressive by India, both then and now. And of course, the loathsome Western media, will barely, if at all, cover this news. Instead, it will concentrate on ‘religious hatred in India during Covid-19 outbreak”. That’s what they look for and love. Jackasses.
The story proves that all Indian governments work far more effectively during crises then during normal times. Both this episode and the 1991 crisis is evidence of Indian governments finding their mojo. Let’s see how the present government responds to the Covid 19 crisis.