IC 814 hijack was a victory for Masood Azhar—and the moment of his strategic downfall

Twenty-five years on, India is debating whether the producers of a Netflix series should have mentioned the Hindu pseudonyms used by IC814 hijackers. The inchoate rage hides painful national wounds.

File image of JeM chief Masood Azhar | Commons

From his room above the Kunar river, looking out over the quiet town of Balakot and the Nainsukh valley, the portly jihadist reflected on the torments God chose to inflict on his faithful soldiers. “The light of the sun and water are essential for crops; otherwise, they go to waste,” Masood Azhar Alvi later wrote. “In the same way, the life of the nations depends upon martyrs. The national fields can be irrigated only with the blood of the best hearts and minds. The road to freedom is paved with human bodies.”

Let out of prison on New Year’s Eve in 1999, in return for the lives of the hostages of an Indian Airlines jet hijacked to Kandahar, Azhar had emerged as a star of the global jihadist movement. Following the hijacking, his new organisation, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked India’s military headquarters in Srinagar, bombed Jammu and Kashmir’s Legislative Assembly, and stormed the Parliament House in New Delhi.

Finally, on the cusp of what he considered a triumph in Kashmir, Azhar was marched by fate to prison again—“manacled to a bedstead, clothes drenched in blood,” he would remember, on the orders of Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf. Azhar retreated to Balakot to nurse his wounds – and his ego.

Twenty-five years after the hijacking, India is locked in a tragicomic debate on whether the producers of a Netflix series should have mentioned the Hindu pseudonyms the hijackers identified themselves by to their victims. The inchoate rage hides painful national wounds. Like in so many other cases, the series reminds us that a seemingly powerless India has yet to punish those who committed violence against the country.

Like Azhar himself, though, India ought to be contemplating how it ended up winning the war in Kashmir, even if there was no surround sound and technicolour climax.

In 1831, Azhar’s ideological hero, the charismatic cleric Syed Ahmad Barelvi, led an ill-fated rebellion against emperor Ranjit Singh. The cleric hoped to eradicate syncretic influences from Islam and restore it to what he considered its pure state. The rebels were, however, betrayed by local tribes loyal to Ranjit Singh, and slaughtered.  Across the river from Syed Ahmed’s austere grave in Balakot, thousands gather at the Bhai Bala ka Baithak, a shrine revered by Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, celebrating the syncretic culture he hoped to dismantle.

The jihadist rockstar

Like other parts of the ageing Ambassador, the fuel gauge wasn’t always reliable: The engine died, starved of fuel, less than a kilometre after the car made its way onto the highway to Srinagar. Early on the morning of 11 February 1994, his second day in Kashmir, Azhar had been driving back from a meeting at the village of Matigund. Forced to take an auto-rickshaw, Azhar and his old jihadist comrade Sajjad Khan ended up being detained by Border Security Force (BSF) guards when the assault rifle-armed pair attempted to scrounge petrol at a pump.

Azhar’s mission to Kashmir, meant to persuade the cadre of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami to merge into the new Harkat-ul-Ansar, had begun badly. Even he, more likely than not, had little idea of how profound the consequences would be.

The son of Allah Baksh Sabir Alvi, a retired schoolmaster and poultry farm owner, the 1968-born Azhar was the fourth of five brothers and six sisters. Azhar initially studied at the local government school in Bahawalpur. However, sources close to the family say that financial pressures led to his being sent to the Jamia Uloom-e-Islamia seminary in Karachi after the eighth grade. He graduated from this Islamic school in 1989, as an alim, a qualification given to those who have memorised the Quran.

Led by the cleric Nizamuddin Shamzai, the seminary had become a powerhouse of the global jihadist movement under the benign gaze of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, scholar Farhan Zahid has written. The seminary drew students from across the world, and Shamzai was a close ally of both al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban chief Muhammad Omar. Azhar ended up joining the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, led by the jihadist commander Fazal-ur-Rehman Khalil.

Even though the somewhat overweight Azhar failed to complete the 40-day Harkat-ul-Mujahideen combat course, his talents were soon recognised. The journalist Innes Bowen has recorded that Azhar made a highly successful fundraising and recruiting trip to the United Kingdom in 1992, addressing gatherings at mosques in Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester, and Sheffield. Azhar was also assigned missions to Bangladesh, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Zambia.

al-Qaeda’s envoy?

Likely, Azhar developed his close connections to Al-Qaeda during this period. Shamzai and Osama Bin Laden, researcher Farhan Zahid writes, had close personal connections, forged in the course of the jihad in Afghanistan. In 1998, following attacks on United States missions in Tanzania and Kenya, Shamzai issued a decree proclaiming that “if Sheikh Osama is captured or harmed, jihad will become obligatory against all governments involved.” This was a threat to the Pakistani state itself.

Azhar himself, the counter-terrorism expert Don Rassler points out, served in Somalia in 1993, alongside al-Qaeda commanders assisting Somali jihadists. According to the Pakistani scholar Muhammad Amir Rana, Bin Laden and Azhar also held two personal meetings during this period, one in Kenya and the other in Saudi Arabia.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents reveal that the Harkat-ul-Ansar received direct financial assistance from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate of between $30,000 and $60,000 a month. The organisation, however, also benefitted from its links with Bin Laden and his affluent Arab jihadist networks.

Kalimullah Khan, the chancellor of the Jamia Farooqui seminary, and Mufti Rafi Usman, the chancellor of Jamia Islamia’s Centre for Jurisprudence, were put in charge of resolving a toxic series of schisms, which erupted over how these resources were to be shared. Azhar was dispatched to Kashmir to enforce their decision to merge all the factions into the new Harkat-ul-Ansar.

Azhar arrived in New Delhi early in 1994, travelling on a stolen Portuguese passport. Following visits to the graves of prominent Islamist intellectuals in Lucknow and Deoband, as well as meetings with injured jihadists being treated at private hospitals in New Delhi, Azhar flew to Srinagar.

The cleric’s accidental arrest led to an unprecedented campaign to secure his release. Four British tourists were kidnapped from Delhi’s downmarket Paharganj neighbourhood in 1994, by a jihadist with intimate ISI links, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. Tourists Kim Housego and David Mackey were kidnapped from a houseboat in 1995. Five more Western nationals were then kidnapped that same year, and executed.

Even though the CIA learned from sources with the Harkat-ul-Ansar that it was preparing to target an Indian passenger aircraft, as revealed in ThePrint, neither New Delhi nor the West prepared for the coming disaster.

Snatching defeat from victory

Likely, Azhar’s close ties to Bin Laden drove the extraordinary effort to have him released: There is no other case in which similar efforts were made for other incarcerated jihadists. “Bin Laden had wanted Azhar freed,” Bin Laden’s bodyguard Nasser al-Bahri claimed, “[and] ordered al-Qaeda to plan the Indian airlines hijacking with Harkat.” This, he claimed, was because “Bin Laden admired Azhar and needed his help.” Following the release in Kandahar, Bin Laden is reputed to have thrown a feast for Azhar at the Tarnak camp.

Taliban officials would privately claim that they cooperated with al-Qaeda during the Kandahar hijacking because of India’s ongoing military support for their rivals, the Northern Alliance, from 1996. Akhtar Mansoor, who succeeded Muhammad Omar as the Taliban’s chief, is believed to have supplied the explosives and assault rifles used by the hijackers. Mansoor, according to Indian officials, also ordered heavy weapons to be deployed to prevent an Indian rescue effort in Kandahar.

Flailing in the hours after the hijacking in Kathmandu, former Punjab Director-General of Police KPS Gill pointed out, the Government of India repeatedly lost opportunities to avoid embarrassment. The chance to terminate the hijacking in Amritsar, when the hijackers did not possess firearms or explosives, was squandered because of poor decision-making, Gill noted.

Little serious investigation into the exact contours of the events in Kandahar was ever conducted, either. The United States did not grant permission to extradite the Taliban government’s now-foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, who it had captured after 9/11. The official translator who negotiated between Indian officials and the Taliban, Rahmatullah Hashemi, lives in Oslo but has never been questioned.

Few details have ever emerged on the hijackers themselves. Zahoor Mistry, alleged to have stabbed passenger Rupin Katyal to death in Amritsar, is reputed to have been killed in a shooting in Karachi two years ago. Fifty-nine-year-old Ibrahim Athar Alvi, Azhar’s brother, is the only one of the five hijackers currently listed on Interpol’s global list of fugitives.

Even though Azhar emerged as a jihadist hero, hubris led to his downfall. The Jaish-e-Mohammed he founded was tainted, from the outset, by its close links with al-Qaeda. This meant the Jaish-e-Mohammed was unable to capitalise on the deep networks of financial and material support that had facilitated its growth. The organisation’s ties to attacks on Western targets—including the assassination of Daniel Pearl, and the 7/7 bombings—further delegitimised its Kashmir operations. Finally, elements inside the Jaish became hostile to General Musharraf after 9/11, earning his wrath.

Following 9/11, India was able to use the changed global climate to argue that the jihadist threat in Kashmir was not just a regional problem but a threat to the world. Kandahar might have been a victory for Azhar—but it was also the moment of his strategic downfall.

Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)