India, Oct. 13 -- On December 24, 1999, an Indian Airlines flight (IC 814) operating between Kathmandu in Nepal and New Delhi was hijacked, and after moving through a few cities, eventually taken to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the ideological home of the Taliban. The hostage crisis ended on December 31. During this period, India's current National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, was one of the main negotiators. A then middle-level Taliban official, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was director general of administrative affairs. Twenty six years later, both these personalities are at the centre of an unconventional geopolitical reality, a quasi-normalisation between the Taliban-led interim government in Kabul and the Indian government as interim for...