Fact Check: Pema Khandu’s ‘Commercial’ Flight to Pasighat Was Not a ‘First’

Under the Rajiv Gandhi regime’s Vayudoot scheme, commercial flights operated to at least four air strips in Arunachal.

New Delhi: On May 20, Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Pema Khandu put out a tweet announcing that he would boarding the “first commercial flight” to Pasighat to be operated by Alliance Air.

“It will be a proud moment for all of us and a remarkable step in the history of Indian aviation sector,” he stated.

Thereafter, seven more tweets from the chief minister’s official twitter handle gave a blow-by-blow account of the “historic moment” he was part of on May 21 where he flew on “the first commercial fixed wing flight” to Pasighat from Guwahati along with his deputy Chowna Mein.

Khandu, son of former Congress chief minister Dorji Khandu, also thanked “PM Narendra Modi ji and the Ministry of Civil Aviation for connecting Arunachal with airways”.

Thereafter, union minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha also thanked Modi for bringing “Arunachal Pradesh on the aviation map”. He was also joined by Department of North East Region (DONER) minister Jitendra Singh to call it “a dream come true” for the people of the state for getting the “first ever commercial flight”.

These tweets, followed by many BJP leaders’ tweets, translated into news stories in the national media before the day ended. All the stories termed the flight as “the first commercial flight” to Arunachal.

Nobody, however, cared to fact check before believing the ruling party politicians’ claims. Khandu did board the 42-seater ATR from Guwahati (it came from Kolkata) to Pasighat, 305 km from the state capital Itanagar, on May 21, but he certainly didn’t take the “first commercial fixed wing flight to Pasighat”.

The facts

Here are the facts – for the sake of the history of civil aviation in Arunachal, and also the Northeast. The first fixed wing commercial flight to not only Pasighat but to some more airstrips of Arunachal began in the late 1980s under the then Rajiv Gandhi government’s Vayudoot scheme.

The scheme was launched in 1981 by the Centre, primarily to connect the northeastern region by air. So, at least 15-20 flights began to operate under the then union civil aviation ministry’s Vayudoot scheme to various northeastern states, including Arunachal. This correspondent vividly remembers taking a flight from Jorhat to Lilabari (Lakhimpur) across the Brahmaputra in one such flight as a school student. Else, one had to board a ferry to Lakhimpur those days.

The service was later extended to states like Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Daman and Diu, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Lakswadeep, Maharashtra, Orissa, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, present-day Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

Gegong Apang. Credit: Wikipedia

The then Arunachal chief minister was Gegong Apang. Though those days, he was in the Congress, Apang later flipped side to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form the first BJP government in the state. He holds the sobriquet of being the first BJP chief minister in the Northeast.

Recalling those days, Apang, presently on a visit to New Delhi, told The Wire, “The airstrips in Arunachal which were under the Vayudoot scheme of fixed wing commercial flights certainly included Pasighat besides Aalo, Daporijo, Tezu, Ziro and Vijay Nagar. We used Dornier aircraft for that route. Those flight didn’t serve food, like some private flights now do. It was to restrict the pricing of the tickets. They were mostly short flights. The government of India used helicopters too in Arunachal then to enhance connectivity in the state. This is certainly not the first time, rather it is resuming services of a route that was suspended.”

Apang told The Wire, “I was there when the first fixed wing commercial flight landed in Pasighat. I am old now, can’t recall suddenly the date or the exact year but I think the civil aviation minister then was Jagdish Tytler. Its been over 30 years now.”

Tytler took over the union civil aviation ministry in October 1986 till February 1988. It was his first stint as a union minister, fresh from the allegations of the anti-Sikh massacre of 1984. The Wire tried to contact Tytler but failed to get a response.

When Vayudoot closed shop in 1993, aviation experts felt that the hub for the Northeast operations should have been Guwahati instead of Kolkata. Also, in the pre-liberalised India (the benefits of liberation showed up in the fag end of the 1990s onwards) most people didn’t have disposable income to board flights, certainly not in the conflict-ridden Northeast. The option to fly was used by many, particularly in the Northeast, only during medical emergencies. Also, the need to fly to bigger cities is a lot more now than it used to be in the 1980s, considering members of a large number of families now either has moved out of the region for education or work. 

“That way, the scheme was before time,” felt Apang.

He said, “I hear that some improvement has been done to the old air strip at Pasighat now to help land the flight from Guwahati. Getting land to make a bigger airport has been an issue. Though I had come up with a proposal to widen the area of the Pasighat air strip but it couldn’t fructify because my government fell. All these years after the Vayudoot flights ceased to exist, the army has been using that airstrip, mostly for helicopters.”

Apang was in the opposite camp of another Congress stalwart from the state, Dorji Khandu, the father of the present chief minister. Accused of the Public Distribution Scheme scam, Apang had to go to jail in 2010. Thereafter, Dorji Khandu succeeded him as the chief minister.

Taking flight

While the Vayudoot scheme was a joint venture between Indian Airlines and Air India, the May 21 resumed flight to Pasighat airstrip is by the Indian Airlines’ subsidiary, Alliance Air. It is part of the Modi government’s plan to revive the unused airports and better regional connectivity. While Vayudoot ran for about 16 years and failed to make much profit, UDAN has been given the deadline of 10 years, extendable if it succeeds to make profit.

Under the the Centre’s UDAN scheme, as per Khandu, the next airstrip to be operational would be Tezu in the Lohit district, a route also used by Vayudoot. The chief minister, in his speech at the function organised at Pasighat airstrip following the flight’s landing, however, didn’t mention when would the Holongi airport be operational. It is reportedly caught in some land issues. If that airport opens, it would take away the label of Itanagar as a state capital which doesn’t have an airport.

Khandu, however, mentioned that soon Zoom Air is likely to also start a flight to Pasighat under the UDAN scheme. Till now, Zoom Air operates to at least two routes in Assam. 

And if and when that Zoom Air flight lands on Pasighat, chief minister Khandu can very well board it and rightly call it to be the “first private fixed wing commercial flight” to land in not just Pasighat but in the entire Arunachal.

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Author: Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty

Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty is Deputy Editor at The Wire, where she writes on culture, politics and the North-East. She earlier worked at The Hindu. She tweets at @sangbarooahpish.