IC-814 hijackers’ Hindu codenames trigger row

The ministry of information & broadcasting on Monday summoned senior officials of Netflix over its web series IC-814 - The Kandahar Hijack after the drama based on the 1999 hijack of an Indian Airlines flight by five terrorists triggered a row over the depiction of the hijackers, and more specifically the aliases they used.

According to a senior government official aware of the details, the officials of the OTT platform appeared before the ministry to provide an explanation amid allegations by social media users and political party leaders that the six-episode series, directed by Anubhav Sinha and released last week, deliberately used the codenames “Bhola” and “Shankar” to identify two of the five terrorists.

To be sure, the Union home ministry in 2000 said the five hijackers referred to one another as “Chief”, “Doctor”, “Burger”, “Bhola” and “Shankar” — with the last also being names often used for the Hindu god Shiva. The men who took control of the aircraft were part of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terror outfit. Their real names were Ibrahim Athar, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Ibrahim, Shahid Akhter, and Sayed Shakir— all Pakistani nationals.

Also Read | MIB summons Netflix officials over use of Hindu pseudonyms in ‘Kandahar Hijack’

“They (the creators of the show) should take care to not hurt the country’s sentiments,” the government official cited above said, seeking anonymity, without detailing whether Netflix was issued any directions.

Among those who criticised the limited series drama was Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) IT cell chief Amit Malviya. “The hijackers of IC-814 were dreaded terrorists, who acquired aliases to hide their Muslim identities. Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha legitimised their criminal intent by furthering their non-Muslim names. Result? Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814,” he wrote on X.

At the same time, other politicians said the controversy was needless. National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah said, “It’s really amusing to see the people who took movies like Kashmir Files as the gospel truth having a melt down at the way the events of IC814 are depicted in the Netflix show. Now suddenly they want accuracy & nuance packaged in the script.”

While Sinha did not respond to requests for a comment, the show’s writer Adrian Levy spoke to HT over the general sourcing of information that underpinned the fictional depiction of the December 1999 incident, without specifically going into the controversy over the character names.

He said the chief figures involved in plot, Ilyas Kashmiri and his protégé Amjad Farooqi, were “attracted to Islamism” and al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden. “With recent histories there are never hard facts but there are suppositions invested in by key officials. What you are seeing [in the show] are those backed by Indian security officials. And those in [CIA headquarters in] Langley,” he said.

Levy, who interviewed Indian security service agents as well as CIA officials for his work as an investigative journalist, said Indian security services determined the hijacking was a conspiracy “pump primed” by Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), but was underwritten by fighters adjacent to al Qaeda.

Some of the crew members of IC-814 that HT spoke to also corroborated the government’s statement in 2000.

Anil Sharma, senior flight purser (in-charge of cabin crew) who is now based in Geneva, said: “The two names (Bhola and Shankar) that are being talked about were actually used by the hijackers… I think the makers of the web series could have somehow specified that the names were not their original names.”

The web series is based on the hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft by five terrorists on December 24, 1999, 40 minutes after it took off from Kathmandu for New Delhi. The plane made several landings, at Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai, before it was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan. The passengers and crew were held hostage for eight days and the stand-off ended when the government released incarcerated terrorists Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar.

Azhar, eventually, did not return to HuM, choosing instead to form his own outfit, the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

The drama, which was released on Netflix on August 29, is based on the book Flight into Fear: The Captain’s Story written by Srinjoy Chowdhury and Devi Sharan, the captain of the flight.

Using hashtags #BoycottNetflix, #BoycottBollywood and #IC814, several X users shared posts claiming the filmmakers changed the names of the hijackers to “Shankar” and “Bhola” to allegedly protect the terrorists who belonged to a certain community.