Click to play videoNew Delhi: Seven years and a book later, the ghost of Kandahar continues to haunt former foreign minister Jaswant Singh. In his book, A Call to Honour, there are some candid confessions about his mission to Kandahar to rescue the hijacked passengers aboard IC-814.
"I do not really know what to term my mission – a rescue mission, an appeasement exercise, a flight to compromise or a flight to the future," Jaswant writes in his memoir.
But some questions still remain unanswered. One of them is — why did India's foreign minister have to accompany the dreaded terrorists to Kandahar in the same plane? Was it correct?
"Why did I go in the same plane? That’s because there was no space left. There was no parking space at the airport for any other plane to park," justifies Jaswant Singh.
The hijacking of IC-814 is one of the saddest episodes of India's polity. It's an issue that politicians, particularly those from the BJP, don't want to talk about.
That's why when senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh decided to give inside details about the entire event in his book it raised eyebrows.
It's an episode that the BJP doesn't like to be reminded of especially for those who have advocated uncompromising policy against terror.
"It's an episode that happened then. My views are known, but it was a Cabinet decision," former home minister and the current Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, L K Advani, says.
As for the Congress, the book couldn't have come at a better time. Facing the Opposition onslaught for being 'soft on terror' after the Mumbai blasts, the Kandahar memoirs have provided a perfect defence for the ruling alliance against the Opposition attack.
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