On December 24, 1999, hijackers took over Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and brought it down at Amritsar. The plane stood there for about 45 minutes, according to Sarabjit Singh, then the head of the Punjab Police. Other accounts give 40 or 74 minutes. Then it took off again, and the hijackers flew on.
In Delhi, the government’s Crisis Management Group was deciding what to do. “No one was willing to take a decision and in that confusion no instructions were passed on to Punjab Police,” A.S. Dulat later said. According to ThePrint, officials in the Amritsar control room waited for instructions from Delhi that never came.