What is there in A Call To Honour

New Delhi: Under intense attack over the way he handled the Kandahar hijack crisis as external affairs minister in 1999, senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh says in his memoirs that he was initially opposed to any compromise with the hijackers.

"Get your bloody fingers out now. For heaven's sake, do anything, don't let the ...(expletive) aircraft leave Amritsar."

The book makes no sensational disclosures about the IC-814 flight that was hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan on Christmas eve in 1999 with 161 passengers and crew on board, but reveals some interesting nuggets about what he describes as a "most demanding and emotionally a most draining period" of his life.

For instance, Singh reveals that he had invited officials of external affairs ministry, who had worked with him, to have champagne at his home in New Delhi on his return from Kandahar on December 31 after securing the release of the passengers and crew in exchange for three dreaded terrorists held in Indian jails.

Singh recounts that the hijacking had taken place about an hour after he had become a proud grandfather.

On learning about the landing of the hijacked aircraft at Amritsar that evening, the former minister says he had almost yelled into the telephone forgetting all diplomatic decorum, "Get your bloody fingers out now. For heaven's sake, do anything, don't let the ...(expletive) aircraft leave Amritsar."

"I still don't know what they were demonstrating by this undignified and demeaning behaviour. But, it certainly did succeed in shaming India, in the eyes of the international community."

He recalls that the hijackers had demanded "$200 million as ransom money, release of some 36 proven terrorists, the interred bones of one terrorist at least."

The Union Cabinet was unanimous and had said in one voice: "Reject the demands, go and tell the press in appropriate words."

Singh is scathing in his attack on those who had held demonstrations to pressurise the government to get the hostages in Kandahar released.

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"I am ashamed even as I recollect how -- initially perhaps spontaneously but thereafter as part of some sponsored embarrassment to the government -- gangs of political activists were persuaded to block roads, interrupt press briefings and, to my mind and memory, so shamingly roll on the roads as if in a kind of collective hysteria."

Jaswant's son had 'totally sincerely' told him, "Offer me as the hostage, your son for all those innocents."

"I still don't know what they were demonstrating by this undignified and demeaning behaviour. But, it certainly did succeed in shaming India, in the eyes of the international community," he writes.

About his flight to Kandahar, accompanied by three terrorists released from Indian jails, Singh says it was not easy to go there, but he had been pressed by officials who wanted somebody who could take decisions on the spot as there was no time to 'keep referring matters to Delhi'.

Introducing a dramatic element into his narrative, he says that he had called his younger son in Jaisalmer before leaving for the Afghan town. The son had volunteered to go with him to Kandahar.

The son had 'totally sincerely' told him, "Offer me as the hostage, your son for all those innocents."

"Of course, I could not, though not because I would not," Singh writes. Reproducing a page from his diary dated December 31, the

BJP leader poses the question whether it was right or wrong to exchange three terrorists for 161 passengers.

"At first, I stood against any compromise, then, slowly as the days passed, I began to change," he says.