More than one story is doing the round about what provoked the purge on that fateful Friday night. Many even recalled similar acts of petulance in the past -- the victims included the legendary J.R.D. Tata -- to drive home the point that nothing had changed in the public sector over the years.

What is disturbing is not so much the indecency of the ministerial act as the ominous portents it conveys. For the last two years, conflicting signals have been coming out of the Union Civil Aviation Ministry which have left the airlines totally directionless. There was the Kelkar Commmittee whichoffered a string of remedies for the ailing domestic carrier. The same personnel were later asked to repeat the exercise to save Air India even as their report on the domestic carrier was gathering dust in the ministry.Around the time, the Disinvestment Commission came out with its package of recommendations on how to hasten the privitisation of the two airlines. Topping all this were the frequent calls for an outright merger of the two airlines which was seen as the only way to keep them afloat.

And just when all these were crystallising into a seemingly workable arrangement and even a revival programme, came the board's arguably unanimous resolution strongly suggesting a holding company as a precursor to an ultimate merger.

Union Civil Aviation Minister Ananth Kumar is overly optimistic of a phoenix-like resurrection of the two airlines following his shock treatment. So are the new chiefs of the airlines whose initial utterances have been brave, though familiar. But brave actions seldom follow bravewords.The argument that disinvestment or privatisation provides the ideal solution is disingenuous. The example of British Airways, often shown as the role model, is a typical case in point.Its remarkable turnaround was made possible not by disinvestment, which came many years later, but by consciously allowing the management to run the airline on purely commercial lines.

What followed was a classic case of a determined management backed by an equally determined government sparing nothing in its pursuit of putting the airline at the top of the league. Some of the decisions were indeed harsh, like writing off accumulated losses, retrenchment of redundant labour and withdrawal of operations from losing routes. The mission was "Putting People first" which, in essence, meant, "persuading management to treat employees and employees to treat customers as human beings."

The strategy was no different either in other successful turnaround cases, the latest being that of the Continental Airline in the US whichin a matter of two years emerged from worst to first. The underlying principle in all these cases is the same, the management's right to manage. This had been very successfully tried even in our own country in Indian Airlines in the early seventies when a strong management which enjoyed political support successfully took on a recalcitrant labour and asserted its right to manage. A repeat performance is certainly not impossible.

That, for sure, calls for two things: one, priority to set matters right in the two airlines keeping other issues like disinvestment, privatisation, merger etc, in abeyance, and, two, grant of functional freedom to the boards on policy matters and operational freedom to the managements in day-to-day functioning.

Both are possible even in the present dispensation, provided there is political will of the kind shown towards IA in early seventies or, on a much broader scale, in the case of SAIL in mid-eighties. On both occasions it was a sensible response to a desperate situationwhich brought results.