Amid the heated controversy over Netflix’s latest series “IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack,” government sources have stressed that the issue is being taken very seriously. A source noted, “Nobody has the right to play with the sentiments of people of this nation. India’s culture and civilisation should always be respected. You should think before portraying something in a wrong manner. The government is taking it very seriously.”

This response followed the summons to Netflix India’s content chief, Monika Shergill, by the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry.

At the time of writing, Shergill was in a meeting with the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting at Shastri Bhawan where she reportedly assured the Centre that “all future content on their platform will be sensitive to and in accordance with the nation’s sentiments.”

“Netflix team has come to the meeting with research documents and footage that have been collected for reference. The OTT platform will be putting forward their view that the series is in accordance with publicly available resources, with the information taken from books and other government statements,” sources said.

The series, created by Anubhav Sinha and Trishant Srivastava and based on Devi Sharan’s book “Flight Into Fear: The Captain’s Story,” has sparked outrage for changing the names of the hijackers to “Bhola” and “Shankar.”

The show, which stars Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Varma, and Pankaj Kapur, dramatises the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by the Pakistan-based terror group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

The Indian Airlines flight was travelling from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, to Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The flight was diverted multiple times before ultimately landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, which was under Taliban control at the time. In the series, the hijackers are referred to as Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola, and Shankar.

The use of the names Bhola and Shankar in particular has sparked outrage on social media, with some users accusing the filmmaker of deliberately giving Hindu names to Muslim hijackers, distorting facts and potentially hurting religious sentiments.

The Union Home Ministry issued a statement on January 6, 2000, revealing the identities of the hijackers: Ibrahim Athar from Bahawalpur, Shahid Akhtar Sayed from Gulshan Iqbal, Karachi, Sunny Ahmed Qazi from Defence Area, Karachi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim from Akhtar Colony, Karachi, and Shakir from Sukkur City.

However, the passengers on the plane knew the hijackers by their codenames – Chief, Doctor, Burger, Bhola, and Shankar – which they used when communicating with one another. Several journalists who reported on the week-long hijacking back in 1999 have taken to social media to confirm that passengers had informed them about the codenames used by the hijackers.

Despite this, BJP leader Amit Malviya criticised the series for using these names. “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. Left’s agenda to whitewash the crimes of Pakistani terrorists, all Muslims, served. This is the power of cinema, which the Communists have been using aggressively, since the 70s. Perhaps even earlier. 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,” the BJP’s IT cell head stated in a post on X on Sunday.

Sharing the post by Malviya, actor and Mandi MP Kangana Ranaut claimed that “censorship is only for some of us, who don’t want tukde of this nation”. A part of her X post said that “one can even distort real life events to suit their politically motivated sinister motives, there is all the freedom for communists or leftists across the world for such anti-national expressions”.