NATIONAL 5 (Spotlight Weekly)]

IC FLIGHT RESUMPTION

Wanted: Transparency

What prolonged the Nepal-India talks still remains a mystery

By A CORRESPONDENT

Nepal-India talks : Contents unknown

Even after good five days' meeting, the Nepal-India joint secretary level teams could not come out with a date for the resumption of the Indian Airlines flights. Rather, the two sides decided to meet once again. The time and the venue for the next meeting is yet to be decided.

More interestingly, what prolonged the bilateral talks is to-date a matter of speculation. All that the two teams told the press was that they decided to meet in the near future. Neither the Nepali team headed by Hari Bhakta Shrestha, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, nor the Indian team headed by Sunil Arora, Joint Secretary at the Indian Civil Aviation Ministry, elaborated further.

"Of the many issues discussed, most of them have been agreed on while few of them are yet to be refined," said Shrestha after the talks last Saturday. But what were the issues that were agreed on and what are those that are yet to be discussed remain mystery.

Amidst pressing querries of newsmen after the fifth day's talk, Shrestha told that the issues included different functions of the Airport right from the time the aircraft lands and till it takes off. He, however, made it clear that the deployment of Indian security officials at the TIA did not surface in the five day talks.

Interestingly, this was the issue the Nepali team made it a point to make clear after every round of talks in the five-day meeting.

When the issues that were not discussed -- like the deployment of Indian security personnel at the TIA -- could be made public, what was the harm in bringing out the issues that were discussed, observers ask.

As a result, what began to appear in the market is specualcations and imaginary stories. A report, for instance, appeared in a daily claiming that the Indian side demanded the cancellation of the inbound Pakistan International Airlines flights to pave way for the resumption of IC flights.

MoTCA officials, however, denied of such an issue having surfaced during the talks. Similarly, many vernacular weeklies and dailies came out with different "points" which, they claimed, were included in the talks. All of these information were attributed to their highly placed sources.

On one hand the Nepali delegation maintained that the talks did not involve any sensitive issues that would lead to the compromise of the country's sovereignty, while on the other they also said that they were in no position to elaborate the issues discussed.

What was missing from the scene? Transparency, of course.

Box:

Indian Airlines suspended its Kathmandu-bound flights after one of its flight (IC 814) was hijacked some half an hour after it took off from the Tribhuvan International Airport on December 24 last year.

The scheduled passenger flight was hijacked in the Indian aerospace and was forced to land at several regional airports including Amritsar in India and Lahore in Pakistan before it reached Dubai in the Middle East.

One day later, the hijacked Airbus was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan where it remained captured for one week. Hijackers freed the passengers -- eight of them were Nepalese -- in exchange of three prisoners in India.

The Indian national flag carrier suspended its Kathmandu-bound flights immediately after the hijack took place citing security reasons.