I&B Ministry summons Netflix India's head of content over 'IC 814' web series

The content head of OTT platform Netflix has been summoned on September 3 by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting over the series 'IC-814 - The Kandahar Hijack' which has triggered a row on social media over the depiction of the hijackers.

In the OTT series, the five hijackers of the flight from Kathmandu are referred to as Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar.

"I vividly remember IC-814. I was very aware of that accident and very involved in following that. Every man and woman in India and indeed in South Asia knows that the hijack of IC-814 from Kathmandu was committed by Pakistan's ISI-backed terrorists. Now, nobody thinks that there were some people from India who did the hijacking. So how the people have Hindu names in that movie, I don't know. But I'm very happy that the I&B Ministry and the GoI have taken cognizance of this and have summoned Netflix" BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

The Hijack drama created by Anubhav Sinha and Trishant Shrivastava stars actors Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Arvind Swamy, Patralekhaa and Dia Mirza.

The six-episode series is based on real events. On December 24, 1999 flight IC 814 an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 enroute to Delhi gets hijacked after take off from the Kathmandu Tribhuvan International Airport in Nepal shortly after it entered Indian airspace.

Soon after take-off, five hijackers, who were posing as passengers, took control of the plane. The hostage crisis lasted for seven days and ended after the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee government agreed to release three militants.

There were 191 passengers on board including 15 crew members, where one person was stabbed, who succumbed to his injuries, while several others were wounded.

BJP's IT cell chief Amit Malviya had posted on X, "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."

Malviya further posted, "This will not just weaken / put in question India's security apparatus in the long run, but also shift the blame away from the religious cohort, that is responsible for all the bloodshed."

In a suo motu statement by then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh in Parliament stated that the hijacked IC-814 aircraft made several landings at Amritsar, Lahore, Dubai before being taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

The government, then led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was forced to release three terrorists -- Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar -- from Indian prisons to secure the release of the hostages.

Later, Masood Azhar went on to form Jaish-E-Mohammad, which claimed responsibility for Pulwama attack in India in 2019, 2001 Parliament attacks and 2016 Uri attacks, amongst others. Currently in Pakistan, Azhar remains active, and was seen attending a wedding in Bahawalpur city of Pakistan's Punjab last month, per media reports.

As per a January 6, 200 statement by the Union Home Ministry the names of the hijackers were identified as Ibrahim Athar, Bahawalpur; Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Karachi; Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Karachi; Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, Karachi and Shakir from Sukkur city

"To the passengers of the hijacked place these hijackers came to be known respectively as (1) Chief, (2) Doctor, (3) Burger, (4) Bhola and (5) Shankar, the names by which the hijackers invariably addressed one another," the statement read.