On 5 September 1986, Pan Am Flight 73 was preparing to depart Karachi airport for Frankfurt and then New York when four men armed with automatic weapons and grenades stormed the aircraft. Neerja Bhanot, twenty-three years old, was the senior flight attendant on duty. The moment she saw the hijackers she did the first of several things that would save lives that day: she broadcast the emergency code to the cockpit, giving the pilots enough warning to escape through a hatch before the hijackers reached the flight deck. Without a crew to fly it, the plane could not be used as a weapon or moved to another location. That decision, made in seconds, changed the entire shape of what followed. She then spent the next seventeen hours keeping passengers calm, protecting the most vulnerable among them, and doing everything in her power to buy time for a situation she must have known was deteriorating. When it did, she died shielding three children with her own body. She was the youngest person ever to receive the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award.

WHO SHE WAS BEFORE THAT DAY

THE SEVENTEEN HOURS

PAN AM FLIGHT 73, KARACHI, 5 SEPTEMBER 1986

The hijacking lasted approximately seventeen hours. After alerting the cockpit and allowing the pilots to escape, Neerja Bhanot became, in effect, the most senior person responsible for the safety of the 379 passengers and 13 remaining crew on board. She collected and hid American passports, knowing the hijackers were looking for US citizens to use as leverage or execute. She kept passengers informed and calm. She distributed food and water through the long hours of the standoff. When passengers needed to use bathrooms, she negotiated with the hijackers for the permission. When a passenger was shot and thrown from the plane, she managed the panic that followed with a composure that survivors have described as extraordinary. As the situation deteriorated late into the evening and the hijackers opened fire and threw grenades, she opened an emergency exit door. She was shot while shielding three children who were escaping through it. She died of her wounds. The children survived.

WHAT THE CHOICES TELL US

It is worth being precise about what Neerja Bhanot did, because the precision is where the courage lives. She did not make one large heroic decision in a moment of adrenaline. She made dozens of small, careful, intelligent decisions across seventeen hours, each of which required her to assess a situation accurately, weigh the risks clearly, and act with a composure that very few people, trained or untrained, can sustain under that kind of sustained threat.

The decision to hide the American passports is particularly significant. It was not instinctive. It required her to think clearly about what the hijackers wanted, what information would endanger whom, and how to act on that analysis without being observed. She was doing crisis management, under gunpoint, over seventeen hours, at twenty-three years old, with no training specifically designed for that scenario. She did it well enough that the death toll, which could easily have been in the hundreds, was twenty. Every one of those twenty deaths was a tragedy. The three hundred and fifty-nine people who survived owed their lives in significant measure to what she did.

“Neerja was not just brave. She was intelligent about her bravery, which is rarer and harder and ultimately what saved the most lives.”

HARISH BHANOT, HER FATHER

THE HONOURS

Ashoka Chakra

INDIA’S HIGHEST PEACETIME GALLANTRY AWARD. YOUNGEST EVER RECIPIENT.

Tamgha-e-Insaniyat

PAKISTAN’S AWARD FOR HUMANITY. ONE OF VERY FEW INDIANS TO RECEIVE IT.

Special Courage Award

AWARDED BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR EXCEPTIONAL
BRAVERY.

She received honours from three countries, which is itself a measure of what she did. India, Pakistan, and the United States each recognised her courage independently, which is remarkable given the political relationships between those three nations in 1986. The Tamgha-e-Insaniyat from Pakistan is particularly significant: it is given for acts of humanity, and it was awarded to an Indian woman who died protecting Pakistani passengers on an American airline during a hijacking by Palestinian militants. The borders that Kalpana Chawla could not see from space dissolved entirely in the recognition of what Neerja Bhanot had done.

WHAT HER FAMILY BUILT IN HER NAME

Her parents established the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust in 1987, which gives annual awards to women who display exceptional bravery, help other women in distress, or work to counter social injustice. The trust has, over nearly four decades, recognised hundreds of women whose courage in their own contexts mirrors what Neerja demonstrated in hers. It is among the most quietly significant things her family did with their grief, turning it outward rather than inward, finding in it a way to honour her by extending her values rather than only preserving her memory.

Also Read: The Women Who Went First – Part 22

The 2016 film Neerja, starring Sonam Kapoor, brought her story to a generation that had not lived through the original events. Her mother Rama Bhanot has been the keeper of her story throughout, speaking about her with a combination of grief and pride that has not diminished in forty years, and ensuring that the texture of who Neerja was before that day, the laughter, the resilience after her marriage, the genuine happiness she had found in her work, is not swallowed by the singularity of how she died.

THE ABUSIVE MARRIAGE SHE LEFT

Neerja Bhanot was married in 1985 and left her husband within weeks, returning to her family in Bombay after experiencing domestic abuse. Her family received her without question or reproach. She rebuilt, trained as a flight attendant, and found in the work a sense of purpose and independence that those who knew her have described as transformative. The woman who died on Flight 73 was not only brave. She was someone who had already demonstrated, in a quieter but equally real way, that she would not accept a diminished life. She had already chosen herself once. On 5 September 1986, she chose other people.

The Women Who Went First has told stories of women who went first into institutions, into art, into space, into freedom movements, onto stages no one who looked like them had stood on before. Neerja Bhanot went first into something this series has not encountered before: a situation of absolute extremity, with no preparation, no precedent, and no possibility of knowing how it would end, and she performed in it with an intelligence and a selflessness that saved hundreds of lives.

She belongs here also because of who she was before that day. She was not a trained soldier or a professional hero. She was a twenty-three-year-old woman from Chandigarh who loved her job, had survived a difficult marriage, and was, by every account, fully and happily herself at the point when history collided with her. She did not choose the situation. She chose how to respond to it, again and again, across seventeen hours, in ways that were consistently intelligent, consistently courageous, and consistently oriented toward the safety of other people rather than her own.

Harriet Tubman, several issues ago, went back through danger for others thirteen times across a decade. Neerja Bhanot had seventeen hours and one opportunity and she used every minute of it in the same spirit: the lives around her were more important than her own safety, and she acted on that conviction with a completeness that left no room for doubt about what she believed or who she was.

She was twenty-three. She will always be twenty-three. And the three hundred and fifty-nine people who walked off that plane walked off it because of what she did. That is not a footnote. That is the whole story.

THE WOMEN WHO WENT FIRST · ABOUTHER MAGAZINE