"When IC 814 gets hijacked on its way to Delhi, hundreds of lives are at stake as the country faces its longest and most alarming aviation crisis," reads the show description for the new Netflix miniseries IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. The show has created a mini-crisis for Netflix, which was accused of portraying the hijackers as Hindus. IC 814 is fiction but is based on the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 by Islamist militants, who forced the plane to fly to various locations before landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in what ended up being an eight-day crisis.
The New York Times reports that director Anubhav Sinha said his intention was to depict the event "exactly in the manner in which it happened"—which, per the government, included two of the hijackers going by the code names "Shankar" and "Bhola." (The BBC reports the other code names used were Chief, Doctor, and Burger.) Shankar and Bhola are common names for Hindu men, and their use fueled an angry reaction on social media, with some arguing the series' use of the code names de-emphasized the fact that the hijackers were Muslim.
A national official from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party complained on X, "Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814." The criticism led Netflix to edit its opening disclaimer—which notes Netflix "does not make any claims of authenticity or historical correctness" regarding the show's events—to include the hijackers' real names: Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, and Shakir. The BBC reports the hijacking ended after the Indian government agreed to release three Pakistani militants. (More Netflix stories.)
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