Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift has opened to mixed reviews. The film, which is based on the true story of how India evacuated more than one lakh of its citizens after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, plays with reality and conflates several real people into one heroic fictional businessman played by Akshay Kumar.
The clearest nod the film makes to the hundreds of people both in and out of the government who contributed to the evacuation is in its credits, when it shows black and white images of people at work.
Captain Vijay Nair, one of the three key Air India officials overseeing the evacuation from Amman died some years before the film was made. Nair’s wife, however, still has photos he had gathered from the operation, which remains the largest and quickest civil air evacuation in history – a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records affirming this adorned Nair's office at the Air India office in Sahar airport in the early 2000s.
There were 1.7 lakh Indians in Kuwait at the time of the invasion. A small group of around 450 people left the country by ship for Dubai soon after, but the vast majority were stranded.
This was where India used its neutral status to exert diplomatic pressure on Iraq. IK Gujral, then the external affairs minister, met Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad soon after the invasion. Iraq, which did not have enough supplies to feed its own citizens, agreed to grant Indians safe passage out of the country to neighbouring Jordan.
Indian embassy officials negotiated with private buses to take refugees 2,000 kilometres by road via Basra and Baghdad to Amman.
The first few flights out of the country were operated by India’s armed forces. These, however, took very long to get clearances and their scale was limited. That was when the government decided to call in the national carrier Air India.
Michael Mascarenhas was the airline’s regional director of the Gulf and the Middle East at the time headed that operation with two deputies, Vijay Nair and Charles Manuel.
The initial trickle of people leaving Kuwait had turned into a flood within a month, forcing Indian officials to improvise. Air India flew over boxes of tickets to Amman with the name field left blank, to be filled in at the gate. The Indian embassy reissued passports for those who had lost or damaged theirs on priority.
Over 59 days, until the middle of October, Air India flew out 111,711 Indians in 488 flights that operated daily from Amman to Mumbai.
27/01/16 Mridula Chari/Scroll.in
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The clearest nod the film makes to the hundreds of people both in and out of the government who contributed to the evacuation is in its credits, when it shows black and white images of people at work.
Captain Vijay Nair, one of the three key Air India officials overseeing the evacuation from Amman died some years before the film was made. Nair’s wife, however, still has photos he had gathered from the operation, which remains the largest and quickest civil air evacuation in history – a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records affirming this adorned Nair's office at the Air India office in Sahar airport in the early 2000s.
There were 1.7 lakh Indians in Kuwait at the time of the invasion. A small group of around 450 people left the country by ship for Dubai soon after, but the vast majority were stranded.
This was where India used its neutral status to exert diplomatic pressure on Iraq. IK Gujral, then the external affairs minister, met Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad soon after the invasion. Iraq, which did not have enough supplies to feed its own citizens, agreed to grant Indians safe passage out of the country to neighbouring Jordan.
Indian embassy officials negotiated with private buses to take refugees 2,000 kilometres by road via Basra and Baghdad to Amman.
The first few flights out of the country were operated by India’s armed forces. These, however, took very long to get clearances and their scale was limited. That was when the government decided to call in the national carrier Air India.
Michael Mascarenhas was the airline’s regional director of the Gulf and the Middle East at the time headed that operation with two deputies, Vijay Nair and Charles Manuel.
The initial trickle of people leaving Kuwait had turned into a flood within a month, forcing Indian officials to improvise. Air India flew over boxes of tickets to Amman with the name field left blank, to be filled in at the gate. The Indian embassy reissued passports for those who had lost or damaged theirs on priority.
Over 59 days, until the middle of October, Air India flew out 111,711 Indians in 488 flights that operated daily from Amman to Mumbai.
27/01/16 Mridula Chari/Scroll.in
