Following outrage over the names of characters in Anubhav Sinha’s new series IC814: The Kandahar Hijack, the Union government has reportedly issued summons to Netflix representatives, including its content head. IC814: The Kandahar Hijack is a fictionalised limited series, which was released on Netflix on August 29.
The six-episode series is based on the real incident of the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines 814 flying from Kathmandu to Delhi. It stars Bollywood actors Vijay Varma, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Dia Mirza, Arvind Swamy, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Aditya Srivastava, and Patralekhaa among others.
Right-wing accounts on social media were offended with filmmaker Anubhav Sinha for giving ‘Hindu’ names to the terrorists in the series. But in reality too, two terrorists were operating under the codename of Bhola and Shankar.
According to reports, the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry has asked Netflix representatives to explain why the content should not be removed from the platform. The campaign against the series gained momentum after Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) IT cell chief Amit Malviya claimed that Anubhav Sinha “legitimised” the criminal intent of the hijackers by furthering their non-Muslim names. "Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814," he said, in a social media post.
According to the Home Ministry’s statement in 2000, the hijackers were identified as Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed , Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, and Shakir– all belonging to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) terrorist group based in Pakistan.
“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 reads.
Reacting to the row, Jammu and Kashmir political leader 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.”