IC 814 survivors say Netflix series has ‘shown the truth’, but there is a catch

Amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the Netflix series ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ over the ‘Hindu’ codenames of the terrorists who hijacked the Delhi-bound Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu 25 years ago, two survivors have shared their insights into the row.

Rakesh and Pooja Kataria were a young couple who were returning home from their honeymoon in Nepal.

“I have heard about the controversies, but what Netflix has shown is the truth,” he said.

Rakesh said out of the five hijackers, two were codenamed “Bhola and Shankar”.

“Those weren’t their actual names, just aliases. Netflix did not make up the names. The five hijackers were Muslim, but the two had Hindu codenames. This is not made up, Netflix has tried to show the truth.”

Echoing her husband’s statement, Pooja Kataria told that “Bhola and Shankar were the names used to call the two hijackers. This is not fiction, but the complete truth”.

“Burger, Doctor, Bhola, Shankar and Chief, were the codenames of the five terrorists. What you see in the Netflix show, is what we actually went through,” she said, adding that watching the series was like reliving the incident 25 years later.

Pooja also said that the show did not show much of what happened internally, but it focused more on the political side, including the negotiations between the hijackers and the Indian government.

She went on to recall that there were a total of 26 couples who were returning from their honeymoon in Nepal, including Rachna and Rupin Katyal, the latter who was killed by the hijackers.

“The scene from when the terrorists announced that the plane had been hijacked, including asking the passengers to keep their heads down from shifting the seats, are exactly the same as what happened in reality.

“We did not really understand at the time what was happening. The term ‘hijack’ wasn’t very popular back in 1999. We thought they would ask for some ransom and get it over with. Little did we know that the ordeal would last seven days. The hijackers also thought that it would end in two days because they asked the stewardess if there was enough water to last for two days,” she noted.

Pooja went on to say the hijacker named Doctor had given a speech where he asked the passengers to convert into Islam.

“He (Doctor) used to say Islam is a better religion, much better than Hinduism. He gave at least three such speeches and the people did get convinced. But on the 30th (December 30, 1999), the hijackers told us that ‘we will have to start killing you now, your government is not doing anything (for your release).”

Created by Anubhav Sinha, ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’, is based on the hijacking of the Delhi-bound Indian Airlines flight which took place less than an hour after the flight took off from Kathmandu on December 24, 1999. The plane was first taken to Amritsar where it was refuelled, then it was taken to Dubai, after which it finally landed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the negotiations took place between the hijackers and the Indian government.

The ordeal lasted for seven days. As per the demands of the hijackers, the Centre released Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar — all high-profile terrorists.

Meanwhile, the series has landed in controversy after people objected to the usage of Hindu names for the Muslim hijackers. According to an earlier report by the External Affairs Ministry, the five terrorists were identified as Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayeed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Mistry and Shakir.

However, the Netflix series did not use their real names and instead used the codenames — ‘Chief’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Shankar’, ‘Bhola’ and ‘Burger’.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting summoned Netflix India content chief Monika Shergill to explain the allegedly contentious aspects of the web series, sources had said.