Saturday, July 25, 2009

Security at Indian Airports

The security at Indian airports is under a renewed limelight after the Kalam fiasco. We will come to that later, but here are a few facts that I have observed at Kolkata/Bangalore/Nagpur/ Bhubaneswar airports.

They do not let anybody other than passengers inside the airport gates. Thus the entire episode of seeing off somebody from the airport becomes a very nasty affair where you just park you car, with all your relatives in it, get off and go inside the airport with no chance of looking back. It’s inside an opaque glass building. (Another question, why make it glass if it is opaque). This is so not the Indian culture where this will be an entire one week worth of Soap opera material. On the other hand, you can really hold hands till the train leaves the platform, may be even run besides the tracks for a while at any Indian Railways platform. No wonder, movies never show "bidai" from an airport.

I don’t know who decides these policies and are probably happy that this is so strict. Apparently this action was taken keeping into view the security threats. But now read on to see how you have to go inside the airport. Show a stupid printout of any ticket with your name and date on it (even a standard 4 student can take an e-ticket, paste it in MS Word, replace the name and get a printout). With this, they watch your ID. Sounds good, but they even accept voters ID. Haha, even I cannot recognize my face in my Voters ID and I showed my voters ID which is in Kannada at Kolkata, Nagpur and Bhubaneswar airports. We have to agree that our airport security people are really smart.

Even if we assume that it was an ok check, listen to this. I had my friend with me. Seeing that she is a girl, and that she was with me and had some printout in her hand, they let her in without any check. "Naari ka samman karo" I guess.

Inside is even funnier. You do not remove anything from your body, not even the metallic belt or the wallet full of coins. The super intelligent gate is probably filtering this out from other metallic objects which you may carry. All you take out is your mobile. Looks like bombs can only be in mobiles. Then they do an embarrassing check with that detector like thing in their hand. (You keep your wallet out at this point, so effectively never checking it). And whoa you are secure.

Let’s concentrate on the women’s line. They do not even take of their handbags (and we all know that there is nothing in the world that is not there in the handbag of a woman) and calmly walk through a curtained alley with no checks. Doesn’t matter how much jewelleries one is wearing, it never beeps. Frisking a woman or asking her to take off her jewels is against the culture probably.

I sincerely hope that this is just the eyewash and may be unnoticeable to us, they are actually monitoring us, with x-ray cameras etc. Atleast I would like to believe so. Otherwise what this means is that our security guards are the smartest people on earth who can identify people from their faces and actions and take suitable action. I can even imagine a conversation amongst fellow security men:
“You know, that guy is a great security guard, he could look at that person from a distance and guess what kind of man he is. I once remember he caught a man randomly and got 4 kilos of marijuana from him. He should get Padmashri”

Come on, typecasting people has always been a practice in India, either it be w.r.t. the clothes they are wearing, the caste they belong and even the shade of brown they are (I practice the last one myself), but security should not be typecasting.

So now, coming to the issue of Kalam, with the above argument, it should follow that Frisking of Kalam should not be a big issue. If everybody has to do that, he can also do it. Moreover, if he really did not want it, he could have chosen national carrier rather than a US private company aircraft. May be Kalam does not even want this to be an issue. May be he finds this media hype unnecessary.

But there is another side. If there is a law of land, it has to be abided. You can protest against it in court, in peaceful marches but certainly not go against it. If it is a law that ex presidents should not be checked at airports, everybody should abide it. Even though this law includes a man called Robert Vadra whose only qualification is Husband of daughter of a dead ex-prime-minister. We can discuss about changing the law, but certainly not take it for granted that for greater good of humanity, we will let a corporation tamper with the law of land.

For the same reasons, I like the fact that internet will be banned (or rather some part) in China and corporations have to abide by it. It is a blatant violation of human rights. I will be the first in any procession against it, but if China has passed it as a law, corporations should adhere to it. Google or Continental can never be bigger than China or India or for that matter even the poorest country in the world.

Company taking on policies of a country is a dangerous trend and should be avoided at all costs.