Air Scare: Are we on tenterhooks?

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Drama on board a Go Air BOM-DEL flight on Saturday morning! All 169 passengers and crew had just boarded an Airbus 320 aircraft headed to Delhi, and were still parked in Bay 6 of Mumbai's domestic terminal, when suddenly a young man onboard shouted "bomb, bomb", throwing passengers and crew into a tizzy. Twenty-two-year-old Malik Mohammed Taha, hailing from Jammu and Kashmir, it turned out, was suffering from a mental disorder and was undergoing psychiatric treatment. His father, seated next to him on the flight, also produced the young man's medical papers proving this claim, leading security agencies to believe this was a genuine case of a person with a psychiatric problem raising a false alarm. Still, according to procedure, security agencies detained the Tahas and carried out an anti-sabotage check on the aircraft. It was two hours before they declared it as safe, and another hour before the aircraft took off.

Security agencies at the airport claim they are more than adequately geared up for these incidents, especially when they involve 'non-specific threats' like this one. But what about 'specific' threats? While Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the big bad cop of the US Department of Homeland Security, is getting passengers' knickers in a twist at US airports because of their infamous full body searches, what is the state of our own aviation security?

Already, with January 26 (Republic Day) around the corner, security agencies at the airport are on high alert. Airport police and security agencies like the bomb threat detection committees and Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) are in full deployment, BCAS (Bureau of Civil Aviation Security) has barred visitors from entering the terminal with passes, and all other security forces are on high alert. Mock drills in recent months have been conducted at domestic and international terminals at regular intervals.

But despite these well-intentioned attempts at bolstering security, the nagging question is: how prepared are we for a real threat from the skies, carried out by urbanised, sophisticated enemies of the state, who fly under the radar? Just this week, some 26 diamond-studded luxury watches and steroids were found hidden in a cavity in the wall of a toilet on an Air India flight - security agencies suspect maintenance staff had to be involved, as the stash could be retrieved only once the aircraft reached the hangar, and the exporter would never have transported it in this fashion unless he was absolutely sure it could not get out. I know of another dealer in luxury watches who regularly has his wife travel with multiple watches hidden under the long sleeves of her kurta, risking danger every time she raises her arms for the 'body check'. Just replace the watches with arms or chemicals, and we have a recipe for disaster.

These loopholes in the security system have to be questioned every time there is real intelligence of a terror threat. Is it time for a drastic overhaul of airport security like the TSA has done, with intensive checking that involves full invasion of privacy (that can also result in allegations of 'outraging modesty', as is the case at US airports)? As airports are packed to capacity during the peak hours, are they doing full justice to the security drill as personnel frisk and screen hundreds of thousands of passengers a day? Don't airports need to integrate high-end security technology into our new privatized, modernized airports to correspond to the growth this sector is seeing? And interestingly, will our opinion-makers, who are mostly VIPs and passengers unused to submitting to a violation of their privacy, lobby for these measures?