Bholanath Pandey and Devendra Pandey hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in 1978. They did this to demand the release of Indira Gandhi. Senior Congress leader Bholanath Pandey was a two-time MLA in Uttar Pradesh. He died on Friday, he was 71 years old. Bholanath Pandey’s body has been kept at his house in Lucknow and his last rites will be performed today on Saturday. He was a two-time MLA from Doaba (now Bairia) assembly constituency of Uttar Pradesh.
Bholanath Pandey is remembered not only for his contribution to politics but also for ‘hijacking’ Indian Airlines flight IC 410 with a toy gun on 20 December 1978. Indira Gandhi was lodged in Delhi’s Tihar Jail on charges related to the scam after the Emergency.
Bhola Nath had hijacked the flight and demanded their release. He did this along with his friend Devendra Pandey before the plane landed in Delhi. There were 132 people on board the plane. Two former ministers of the Emergency period, AK Sen and Dharambir Sinha were also on board the plane.
Actually, the flight coming from Kolkata to Delhi took off from Lucknow at 5:45 pm. The flight was just 15 minutes away from reaching Delhi, when there was some commotion in the 15th row. Bholanath Pandey and Devendra Pandey got up from their seats and reached the cockpit. After entering the cockpit, they made the flight captain announce that the flight has been hijacked and now it is going to Patna instead of Delhi. After some time, it was announced that the flight will go to Varanasi.
Flight Captain MN Bhattiwala had told in an interview that both of them had first asked the pilots to go to Nepal, but they refused. Bholanath and Devendra had also asked them to go to Bangladesh, but they refused again. This incident was quite strange.
During this time, Bholanath Pandey and Devendra Pandey gave a speech on the intercom and introduced themselves as members of the Youth Congress. They said that they believed in non-violence and no harm would be done to the passengers. Bholanath Pandey also demanded that all cases against Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi be withdrawn. Both of them raised slogans of ‘Indira Zindabad’ and ‘Sanjay Zindabad’ in the plane, to which the passengers clapped and cheered.
According to reports, most passengers did not take the incident seriously. When the flight landed in Varanasi, Bholanath Pandey and Devendra Pandey met the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ram Naresh Yadav, who was a member of the Janata Party in power at the Centre. After hours of negotiations and assurances that Indira Gandhi would be released, the plane was allowed to leave. After this, Bholanath Pandey and Devendra Pandey surrendered.
However, after Indira Gandhi returned as Prime Minister in 1980, the charges against Bholanath and Devendra were dropped and both were given tickets by the Congress in the 1980 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. Bholanath Pandey had said in an interview that the hijacking of the flight was purely a protest, aimed at pressurizing the Janata Party government to release Indira Gandhi.
Source (PTI) (NDTV) (HINDUSTANTIMES)