Netflix India content head meets I&B ministry after contentions raised on series based on IC-814 hijack

New Delhi: The head of OTT platform Netflix India, Monika Shergill is meeting the Joint Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting today. The meeting is being held in view of certain contentious issues on the web series based on the Hijacking of IC-814. The meeting is being held at Shastri Bhawan.

"Nobody has the right to play with the sentiments of the people of this nation. India's culture and civilization should always be respected. You should think before portraying something in a wrong manner. The government is taking it very seriously" said Government sources on why the Netflix content head was summoned.

Further, sources said that the 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.

The Netflix series ‘IC-814- The Kandahar Hijack’ had trigged a row on social media over the depiction of the hijackers.

Additionally, a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) had been filed in the Delhi High Court by Surjit Singh Yadav, Chief of Hindu Sena, seeking a ban on the Netflix series. 

The PIL alleged that the series distorts the actual identities of the terrorists involved in the hijacking. The petition claimed that the miniseries erroneously assigns Hindu names such as "Bhola" and "Shankar"--names associated with Lord Shiva--to the real hijackers Ibrahim Akhtar, Shahid Akhtar Sayeed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Mistry, and Shakir.

BJP leader Amit Malviya also criticised the series, saying that the filmmaker Anubhav Sinha legitimised the criminal intent of the hijackers.

"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," Malviya said in a post on X. 

BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar said he was happy that the Information and Broadcasting Ministry have taken congizance of the issue.

"I vividly remember IC-814. I was very aware of that accident and very involved in following that. Every man and woman in India and indeed in South Asia knows that the hijack of IC-814 from Kathmandu was committed by Pakistan's ISI-backed terrorists. Now, nobody thinks that there were some people from India who did the hijacking. So how the people have Hindu names in that movie, I don't know. But I'm very happy that the I&B Ministry and the GoI have taken cognizance of this and have summoned Netflix," Chandrasekhar said.

The Hijack drama is created by Anubhav Sinha and Trishant Shrivastava. It stars actors Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Arvind Swamy, Patralekhaa and Dia Mirza.

The six-episode series is based the events of December 24, 1999 when an Indian Airlines flight IC 814 enroute to Delhi from Kathmandu was hijacked after take off from the Kathmandu Tribhuvan International Airport in Nepal shortly after it entered Indian airspace.