Netflix announced on Tuesday it will address outrage in India due to a historical drama about the terrorist hijacking of an airplane by adding a disclaimer to the beginning of the series. This may not mollify the critics, who are incensed that the Muslim terrorists responsible for the real-life incident were replaced with Hindus.
The Netflix series, titled IC-814: The Kandahar Hijack, is based on a true story about the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane 25 years ago.
Indian Airlines Flight 814 (known as IC-814) took off from Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu on December 24, 1999, bound for New Delhi, India, with 179 passengers and 11 crew aboard. The plane was hijacked in-flight by five members of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM). Their plan was to hold the plane and passengers hostage until India agreed to release several Pakistani terrorist leaders from prison.
The hijacking turned into a terrifying week-long ordeal, as the terrorists forced the plane to keep moving, flying to several different destinations before ending up in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The first Taliban regime was in control of Afghanistan at the time, making it impossible for outsiders to help rescue the prisoners.
The Taliban became involved in the hostage negotiations, mostly supporting the kidnappers, although they thought some of their demands for money and other concessions were unseemly for Muslim holy warriors. The Taliban fully supported the hijackers’ efforts to secure the release of Muslim terrorist leaders, however.
The hijackers originally demanded the release of 36 terrorists plus $200 million in cash, but the Indian government eventually bargained them down to accepting the release of three high-profile terrorist leaders. One of the men they released, Masood Azhar, went on to found a dangerous extremist group called Jaish-e-Mohammad, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations and blamed for several attacks in India.
The Taliban broke its promise to arrest the hijackers and allowed them to leave Afghanistan scot-free after they released their hostages.
The identity of the hijackers is not a secret, or a matter of conjecture. They used code-names during the attack, but their real names were later released by the Indian government. They killed one of their hostages, a 25-year-old newlywed named Rupin Katyal who was on his way home with his bride from a honeymoon in Natal.
On the first night of the ordeal, the terrorists decided to separate some of the male passengers from their wives and girlfriends, moving them to the business-class section of the plane. This was intended to terrify the passengers into submission and reduce the odds of them mounting a resistance. The hijackers felt everyone wasn’t scared enough, and they were frustrated by the Indian government’s refusal to capitulate to their demands, so they decided to murder someone.
One of the hijackers separated Katyal from the rest of the male passengers, repeatedly stabbed him in the chest, abdomen, and face, and then slit his throat. According to the captain of the plane, Katyal’s last words were a tortured plea for water as he bled to death. The terrorists did not give him any water. Instead, they tossed a blanket over his mutilated body and left him to die. His wife Rachna was not told of his death until several days later in her ordeal.
Other passengers said the terrorist who murdered Katyal made relentless attempts to convert the other hostages to Islam.
“He gave us three to four speeches about converting to Islam, saying Islam is a very good religion, better than Hinduism,” one of the survivors recalled. The hijackers also robbed the passengers, telling them the money would be used as charity for “poor Afghanistan.”
The hijacking of IC-814 was a significant event in several respects. India condemned Pakistan’s notorious ISI intelligence service for supporting, and even masterminding, the hijacking. Some Indians were outraged that their government capitulated to the hijackers’ demands and released some of the terrorists they wanted. With the benefit of history, the hijacking fits into a pattern of escalating international terrorism that would culminate with 9/11.
All of which makes it utterly bizarre that anyone thought it would be a good idea to fictionalize the incident by concealing the Muslim identity of the hijackers. The IC-814 series by Netflix refers to the hijackers only by the code names they used during the attack — the throat-slitting convert-to-Islam terrorist was “Doctor,” for example. Another went by “Shankar,” a common Indian name.
Since the hijackers were portrayed by Indian actors, and the 10-part series otherwise invests a great deal of effort into getting the details of the story right, this created the impression that the plane might have been hijacked by some Hindu militant group. Much of the Indian audience responded about as well as most of an American audience would to a 9/11 documentary that changed the hijackers into cranky rednecks.
A trending hashtag called #BoycottNetflix exploded on social media platform X over the weekend, and members of India’s governing BJP party joined the criticism, saying the show was far too sympathetic to the brutal hijackers and misled the audience about their identity.
“The hijackers of IC-814 were dreaded terrorists, who acquired aliases to hide their Muslim identities. Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha, legitimized their criminal intent, by furthering their non-Muslim names. Result? Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814,” said BJP leader Amit Malviya on Sunday.
“The Left’s agenda to whitewash the crimes of Pakistani terrorists, all Muslims, is served,” Malviya continued. “This is the power of cinema, which the Communists have been using aggressively since the 70s.”
On Monday, a Hindu group filed a petition with the Delhi High Court to ban “IC-814” from broadcast in India.
“The distortion of crucial facts about the real identities of the hijackers not only misrepresents historical events but also perpetuates harmful stereotypes and misinformation, warranting interference of this court to prevent further public misunderstanding and potential harm,” the petition said.
India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting reportedly summoned Netflix India executives to a meeting on Tuesday, asking them to explain various controversial aspects of the series. On Wednesday, Netflix announced it would add a disclaimer to the show that will “include the real and code names of the hijackers.”
One of the people speaking in defense of the Netflix show is Pooja Kataria, a survivor of the IC-814 hijacking. Like murder victim Rupin Katyal, she was a young newlywed flying home from a honeymoon in Nepal when the terrorists struck. She said it took her ten years to work up the nerve to fly again.
“I don’t know why people are making a controversy around the series. The series is based on a real event and the names of the hijackers used in the series are also factual,” Kataria said on Wednesday.
“Bhola, Shankar were their names. They might be code names but that’s what they called each other. We heard them,” she clarified, meaning the Netflix show correctly used the aliases chosen by the terrorists. She still has a shawl given to her by one of the terrorists as a gift when she told him it was her birthday. He signed it with his code name, “Burger.”
Kataria said she is still tormented by memories of her hostage ordeal, but she saw the Netflix show as a harmless dramatization of history.