Hijackers Stabbed A Man To Show They Meant Business: Govt Advisor, Who Was Then In PMO, On IC 814 Amid Row

Even as the row over the depiction of facts in IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, a show directed by Anubhav Sinha which released on Netflix this weekend, continues, Kanchan Gupta, Senior Advisor, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, gave the details on X. Gupta was in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as OSD to then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the time of the 1999 incident.

The show, based on the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 or IC 814 by terrorists and featuring Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Arvind Swamy and Dia Mirza, got into controversy on social media on Sunday, as many pointed out the non-Muslim names of the hijackers in the show and sought a boycott. Another issue raised was that one of the hijackers is shown sympathetic.

For example, one of them, codenamed ‘Burger’, was seen telling the air hostess to take care of herself. A shot of hijackers and hijacked playing antakshari is also being seen as wrongful projection.

The I&B Ministry on Monday summoned Netflix representatives to explain why the series should not be taken off air and why the OTT platform should not face action.

“I was in the Prime Minister’s Office as OSD to PM AB Vajpayee and member of the National Security Advisory Board (working closely with NSA Brajesh Mishra) when the hijacking of IC814 happened. I had a front row view of the events linked to the hijacking and its resolution. Here is what happened. Anything else is fiction. Certain details that impact national security have not been mentioned, wrote Gupta, with a link to a blog post.

“The Kathmandu-Delhi flight had been commandeered by five hijackers (later identified as Ibrahim Athar, resident of Bahawalpur, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Gulshan Iqbal, resident of Karachi, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, resident of Defence Area, Karachi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, resident of Akhtar Colony, Karachi, and Shakir, resident of Sukkur City) at 5:20 pm; there were 189 passengers and crew members on board; and that the aircraft was heading towards Lahore,” read the blog entry, adding, “…The hijackers, anticipating commando action, first stabbed a passenger, Rupin Katyal (he had gone to Kathmandu with his newly wedded wife for their honeymoon; had they not extended their stay by a couple of days, they wouldn’t have been on the ill-fated flight) to show that they meant business, and then forced the pilot to take off from Amritsar.”

“The hijackers wanted 36 terrorists, held in various Indian jails, to be freed or else they would blow up the aircraft with the hostages,” the blog post read.

According to the Ministry of External Affairs, the hijackers, although Muslim from Pakistan, had codenamed themselves as Burger, Shankar, Bhola and Doctor.