Why Did IC-814 Series Mute ISI Role?

Captain Devi Sharan and Flight Engineer Anil Jaggia both confirm that the hijackers seemed to know a lot about flying an aircraft.
Without help from the ISI or the Pakistan army, it was impossible, points out Utkarsh Mishra.

IMAGE: A scene from the Netflix series IC-814 — The Kandahar Hijack. Photograph: Kind courtesy Netflix

I could finally finish watching IC-814: The Kandahar Hijack on Netflix. Despite its fast-moving plot and a battery of great actors, the series was not really binding apart from a couple of middle episodes.

It faced strong criticism from different sides, so much so that the information and broadcasting ministry found the need to intervene and summon Netflix India’s content head, after which the OTT platform decided to add real names of the hijackers at the beginning of each episode.

The series is based on the book Flight into Fear by Captain Devi Sharan, who piloted the fateful flight. IC-814’s flight engineer Anil Kumar Jaggia also wrote a book about the episode called IC 814 Hijacked: The Inside Story.

I went through both these books and found that the makers have tried to stick to Captain Sharan’s book to a large extent. Although both these books were mostly about what was happening with the passengers and crew of the flight during the period of captivity, they also give some of the details of what was happening outside which the authors came to know later.

However, at times the series somewhat deviates from the details Captain Sharan has given in his book, and some of these deviations could have given rise to the controversies.

So, here I list some of the objections raised with the series and whether the corresponding sequences shown in it were different from what actually happened.

‘Hiding identities of terrorists behind Hindu names’

It was the most ridiculous of controversies that surrounded the series.

Firstly, both Captain Sharan’s and Anil Jaggia’s books identify the five terrorists — named Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, Shakir — by their code names throughout: Chief (or Red Cap), Doctor, Burger, Bhola and Shankar, respectively.

Why? Because that’s how they were calling themselves and each other and the passengers and crew of IC-814 didn’t know better till they were freed. They knew the terrorists by these names only. As this statement (external link) issued by the Union home ministry on January 6, 2000, also explains.

The series could not have changed this fact.

In fact, Capt Sharan has recounted in his book that the hijackers never even revealed their faces. They had their faces covered all the time with monkey caps and lifted it up a bit only when they had to eat.

Most of the time, the people were forced to sit with their heads down. Doing this for hours was very uncomfortable for them and many of them felt claustrophobic. But the hijackers did not relent.

Secondly, the series makes no attempt to hide their identities. Five minutes into the series, in a private conversation recorded by the Research and Analysis Wing (RA&W), we hear one of the terrorists calling another by his real name, to which he retorts, ‘Don’t take names, please.’

We also see Masood Azhar’s father telling his other son, the hijacker who later went by the name of Chief, to ‘bring his brother back or sacrifice his own life in the attempt’. Later, the series identifies Azhar as an ‘exporter of Islamic Jihad’. Also, his father runs a lot of ‘madrasas across Pakistan’.

After all this, anyone who thinks that the hijackers were Hindus, because two of them took codenames Bhola and Shankar, is sadly yet another child left behind.

‘It humanises hijackers’

A section of people also vented out their anger on social media over the ‘humane projection’ of hijackers in the series.

When the government summoned Netflix India’s content head, news reports cited ‘official sources’ as saying that ‘nobody has the right to play with the sentiments of the people of this nation’.

One can claim that the very act of depriving innocent people of their freedom and liberty and forcing them into a situation where they constantly fear for their lives is itself an inhuman act.

The series shows the terrorists always threatening the passengers and crew, they hit some of them so badly that they bleed profusely, they mercilessly stab two passengers, one of whom dies (25-year-old Rupin Katyal, who got married only 20 days earlier and was returning from his honeymoon with his wife Rachana).

However, there are sequences in the series where the hijackers — especially Burger — are shown helping the injured, including Katyal. This didn’t happen.

In fact, a passenger recounts in Anil Jaggia’s book that Katyal was begging for water, and an air-hostess tried to help him by providing water, but the hijacker going by the name Doctor refused and asked him to be covered in a blanket instead.

Capt Sharan’s book also reveals — as shown in the series — that Burger was the most talkative one and he kept cracking jokes with people. The passengers were also ready to cooperate with him, perhaps to be ‘on the right side of the hijackers’.

The following two paragraphs perfectly sum up the paradoxical situation:

For Burger, the meals were a bit of a joke. He made fun of the passengers. ‘What would you like to eat, ladies and gentlemen? What can I serve you?’ he would say. Burger would insist that ‘special khana’ was arriving. What he seemed to be consciously doing was to keep the passengers relaxed.

If he can joke with us, he’s not going to kill us, was the logic that seemed to comfort many of the passengers. In fact, some of the newly married women would be very coy. ‘Burger bhaiya, what’s for dinner tonight?’ they would ask. ‘Oh, special khana for you,’ he would reply.

I noticed everyone trying to help them, to ingratiate themselves even. It was as if the passengers felt that they would be spared if they cooperated. If they were on the right side of the hijackers, they thought, they wouldn’t be shot. I realised later that it was the beginnings of what is called the Stockholm syndrome, where prisoners begin to sympathise with their kidnappers or captors.

So, the scenes where all this is shown are not completely inaccurate.

There are a couple of scenes where Burger and Doctor could be seen as justifying their actions. These are perhaps based on a conversation Captain Sharan had with Chief. When he asked him about Rachna Katyal (who did not know that her husband had been killed), Chief replied, ‘She is only one girl. In Jammu and Kashmir, 25,000 of my sisters have no news of their husbands!’

‘It gives a clean chit to Pakistan and ISI’

This is absolutely correct and is one of the most glaring inaccuracies with the series. It began by showing that an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent working as a first officer with the Pakistan embassy in Kathmandu was colluding with the hijackers, it fell short of clearly establishing Pakistan’s role in the hijacking. Whereas the Indian government statement on January 6, 2000, called it ‘Pakistan’s Operation Hijack’.

At the end, the series informs that after the three terrorists were freed as per the hijackers’ demand and the hostage passengers were released, RDX was recovered from the house of ISI’s station head at Kathmandu.

Yet, it goes on to say that the ISI was not linked to the hijack as the three freed terrorists and the hijackers were called for dinner at Osama bin Laden’s basecamp at Tarnak Farms, but the ISI was kept away from it.

It is baffling that the writers used this discreet information to disassociate Pakistan and ISI from the hijacking. Even if ISI was kept away from the said gathering, it could have been by design.

On the other hand, the makers ignored other glaring evidence that clearly establishes a Pak hand behind this incident.

Both Captain Sharan and Anil Jaggia’s books confirm that the hijackers were ready to release the injured passengers at Lahore, but Pakistan refused to accept them, going against all international norms. It remains a matter of debate whether Rupin Katyal could have been saved if Pakistan had decided otherwise.

While it mentions the fact that a top R&AW officer then stationed in Kathmandu was also on board IC-814, which remained a well-guarded secret in India till very late, it failed to show that Islamabad had publicised this detail with much glee, blaming India for ‘staging the hijack to defame Pakistan’.

All five hijackers were Pakistani nationals. Their four aides, who were members of Rawalpindi-based Harkat-ul Mujahideen, were arrested from Mumbai.

Unlike Nepal and the UAE, Pakistan refused to cooperate with the Indian government’s investigation in the case. While they refused to take injured Indian passengers, the hijackers and released terrorists faced no problem in crossing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Later, too, Pakistan made no attempts to arrest or apprehend the hijackers or the terrorists.

Captain Sharan and Jaggia both confirm that the hijackers — especially Burger — seemed to know a lot about the technicalities of flying an aircraft. They seemed to have completed their drills well. Without any help from the ISI or the Pakistan army, it was impossible.

The series hints at al-Qaeda’s hand behind the hijacking.

Dilip Hiro’s book War without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response lists the hijacking as a part of al-Qaeda’s ‘millennium attack plots’.

As per Captain Sharan and Jaggia, the hijackers too kept talking about a ‘millennium gift to the Indian government’.

It’s possible that the two are linked and that could also explain why the Taliban entertained the hijackers and involved themselves in the negotiations.

But to say that Pakistan or the ISI had no clue about it is baseless.

The series goes a step ahead and shows that at Dubai’s Al Minhad airport, the official who negotiated the release of passengers was a Pakistani and he convinces the terrorists to do so by making them recall Prophet Muhammad’s words.

This is only partly true. One, as said earlier, the hijackers were ready to release the injured passengers in Lahore itself. And two, while Captain Sharan and Jaggia both praise the efforts and assistance of an ATC official called Abdullah at Dubai airport, neither mentions that he was a Pakistani. And he was certainly not reciting Quranic verses to them.

Why the makers chose to add this extra bit of information is anyone’s guess.

A few more hits and misses

If I can speak for other viewers like me, I think many of them would have liked to see more about the situation in Kashmir at that time and about the history of terrorism in the Valley. How the hijacking of IC-814 was similar to that of Indian Airlines’ plane Ganga in 1971 by Kashmiri separatists and how the Indian government reacted then.

The series tried to cover some of these issues in the intervening voice-overs. But it was not as detailed as it needed to be.

It shows how the Indian authorities failed to react in time to prevent the aircraft from taking off from Amritsar. It was perhaps the only incident for which everyone associated with the establishment at the time acknowledges their failure.

But apart from Pankaj Kapur playing a character based on then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh, other important members of the Cabinet Committee on Security, including the prime minister, are absent from the cast.

While it is true that Singh was authorised by then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to supervise the response, the Crisis Management Group was being monitored by then home minister L K Advani.

Advani was also reportedly upset at the decision to release the terrorists.

All these intra-governmental dynamics were missing from the show.

The portrayal of journalists covering the crisis was also very superficial. It was the age of television and there was footage of the plane surrounded by the Taliban in Kandahar and of protests by the relatives of passengers in the streets of New Delhi. Some of this footage is used in the series too.

Yet, it highlights only one journalist (with help from another) from a single newspaper focusing on the incident, even though we know that an event of this magnitude would have energised entire newsrooms, that tend to be chaotic even on normal days.

There were reports in the media about one of the survivors being displeased by the series not showcasing the attempts by the hijackers to proselytise their hostages.

Captain Sharan’s book gives details of these attempts by Doctor and Burger.

‘God has given you a mind. All of you should embrace Islam. Then you will be able to experience the wonders of the religion. It is the best religion in the world,’ Sharan quotes Doctor as saying.

However, the series is silent about these instances.

In conclusion, it can be said that the series had the potential to be much better. However, some controversies, such as the names of the hijackers, were blown out of proportion.

While there are inconsistencies between the series and the actual events, if viewed purely as a cinematic interpretation of a real incident, we can agree to disagree with it.