Saturday, October 18, 2008

Airport security and our local terrorists

I have no sympathy for Jet Airways' recent moves in sacking and then reinstating nearly 2000 employees. (The downsizing was not a problem to me, but the manner of it was.)

Nevertheless, I am concerned that Jet Airways apparently backtracked in deference to Raj Thackeray's threats not to allow Jet flights to take off from Mumbai. Even if they deny it, Naresh Goyal did give Thackeray an audience, so the perception is hard to dispel.

The concern is this: Aren't our airports supposed to be about the safest places in our country? Hasn't every airport in the world been locked down hard since a certain day in 2001? Have we not taken security seriously since at least a couple of decades before that?

So why are they scared of Raj Thackeray and his riff-raff? And given that they are scared of him, should we be scared about other things too?

2 comments:

km said...

This is simply astounding for so many reasons. That one moron can threaten a multi-million dollar business. That the business owner actually takes the threat seriously.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

It's not the first such incident -- either the Shiv Sena or the MNS (I forget which -- probably the latter) agitated against the GMR group's signs at Mumbai airport saying the GMR logo was larger than the name "Chhatrapati Shivaji" and claiming insult. And they got a grovelling apology and rapid changes.