Suparna Sharma 
“Sab khairiyat, Ram miyan? Kuch dhoond rahe hain kya? (All well, Ram miyan, searching for something?)” Farhat Hashmi, first officer at the Pakistan embassy in Kathmandu and an ISI agent, asks Ram Chandra Yadav in the first scene of the Netflix series, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack.“Achaar… Biwi Indore gayi hai na (My wife’s gone to Indore, and I am looking for pickles),” replies Yadav, an Indian embassy official and a RAW operative who has been stalking Hashmi.
“Achaar toh hum khilate hain aapko, badhiya, Pakistan ka is baar. Yaad karenge, (We will treat you to pickle, a Pakistani one. You won’t forget it.)”
While the two are talking, Ram watches a man take a bag out of Hashmi’s parked car.
“ISI kisi khurafat mein hai (ISI is up to some nonsense),” Ram tells his boss in the next scene.
After this banter among the two spies, the scene cuts to Kathmandu airport on December 24, 1999, where. We see two bearded, bespectacled men waiting to board IC 814, the Kathmandu-Delhi flight.
While the plane is being cleaned and the crew is organising stuff, a uniformed man quietly places a bag in the overhead luggage hold. It’s the same bag we had seen leaving Hashmi’s car.
We see Hashmi again, arriving at the airport, carrying a briefcase. He breezes through security and one of the bearded, bespectacled men follows him. Hashmi returns to his car without the briefcase.
A few minutes later, on board IC 814, three bearded men and two others take out guns, grenades and hijack the plane. As news begins to reach the RAW, Intelligence Bureau (IB), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and eventually the prime minister, a cable arrives in Delhi from Kathmandu: “High alert. ISI active. Suspected Pakistani terrorists on board IC 814.”
These scenes – some real, others fictionalised – make up almost the entirety of the first episode of Anubhav Sinha’s six-part series. They establish, beyond any doubt, who was behind the hijack and who supplied the arms – Pakistan’s ISI.
Yet, since it dropped, irritation against IC 814, has been rising in several quarters.
The first wave of rage came from the right wingers. They were miffed that instead of using the full names of the hijackers, the series had used the codenames – including two Hindu ones – that the hijackers had used on board IC 814. Never mind that this is factual. The makers of the series were accused of “concealing” the hijackers’ identity – Islamic terrorists. The information and broadcast ministry intervened and now, in a disclaimer, their real names appear before each episode.
But the anger against the OTT series hasn’t died down. Every day there are new charges: The series has been accused of doing a PR job for ISI and a hatchet job on our own intelligence agency, RAW, because one of its officials is shown torturing civilians. Many are upset that there isn’t enough focus on Pakistan and ISI, and that there’s too much talk of Taliban, Al Qaeda. One news report even objected to the series because it “humanises the terrorists”.
In his column, Vir Sanghvi highlighted and mocked a few silly things in the series – a large board behind the minister, a spy clicking his heels, fauji style – that are common to many Indian films and shows. He then used these to accuse the series of not just ‘inaccuracies’, but also lies and went on to say that “nobody involved with the show seems to have any idea of how the intelligence agencies or the Government of India function”.
Research, authenticity and spin
Sinha’s series is based on the 2000 book, Flight Into Fear: The Captain’s Story, by Captain Devi Sharan, the pilot of IC 814, and journalist Srinjoy Chowdhury. And the series’ story is credited to Trishant Srivastava (who co-wrote the Netflix series Jamtara) and Adrian Levy, investigative journalist and author who, along with Cathy Scott-Clark, has written several exceptional books that are deep-dive accounts of terrorist attacks.
Apart from Sharan’s book, Sinha’s series also draws facts and vignettes from the book Spy Stories, for which Levy and Scott-Clark interviewed Ajit Doval, who was the additional director in IB in 1999 and one of the chief negotiators, Brijesh Mishra, the then principal secretary to the prime minister, several RAW chiefs, military intelligence officials and others.
So research and authenticity doesn’t seem to be the issue. Narrative does.
Also read: ‘IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack’ Is Competent, Evokes a Sense of Deja Vu
The world of spies and intelligence gathering is one of deceit and lies, of mind games and narratives, of egos and settling scores. Unlike 9/11, which has an official report of the events leading up to the attacks (prepared by the Kean/Hamilton Commission) that is easily accessible, there is no such report on the IC 814 hijacking.
In India, we never really get an independent, official version of monumental events, of terror attacks, of who did what, or didn’t do. At times there are national security issues in play, but mostly the concerns are personal. The government and bureaucracy closes ranks to save reputations of institutions and powerful people, to cover up unsavoury behaviour, blunders, negligence, indolence, corruption and plain malfeasance.
One nation, one villain
So, in the absence of any independent investigation and report on a national crisis, different versions are doled out. Among journalists, it becomes a battle between my version as per my source Vs your version as per yours, and on social media it’s a field day for trolls to take things out of context, invent theories, ascribe motives, hurl accusations and, increasingly, try to frame a series, a film, a director or actor as anti-Indian.
In 1999 – a year after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government flexed its muscles with the Pokhran nuclear test – Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee took the initiative and launched a bus service between Delhi and Lahore.
Pakistan responded with the Kargil war. India lost about 527 soldiers, but it also forced a “cringing withdrawal” by General Pervez Musharaff.
The IC 814 hijacking, which came soon after, was framed by the Indian government and its intelligence network as his revenge for Kargil.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
Three aggressive, bloody attempts had been made in the past to free Maulana Masood Azhar, the general secretary of Harkat ul-Ansar (HuA), who was in a Jammu jail.
In 1994, four foreigners were kidnapped in Delhi by Afghani militants, and the next year, six foreign tourists were kidnapped in Kashmir by Al Faran, an offshoot of HuA. There was also an attempted jail-break but all were unsuccessful. IC 814 was the fourth attempt to free him.
Several officials and ministers spoke of overwhelming evidence of the ISI’s involvement in the hijacking. Union home minister L.K. Advani said, “The hijack was an ISI operation, executed with the assistance of Harkat ul-Ansar. All five hijackers were Pakistanis.”
The ISI had “pump-primed” the hijacking, but in Spy Stories, Levy and Scott-Clark quote a former RAW analyst as saying that Amjad Farooqi, who had links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, was involved in the hijacking.
Also read: Fact Check: ‘Bhola’, ‘Shankar’ Were Aliases Used by IC 814 Hijackers, Not the Makers’ Invention
In the series’ second episode, external affairs secretary DRS (played by Arvind Swami), listens to a recording sent from Kathmandu and then briefs the minister (Pankaj Kapur) about Amjad Farooqi, “a brutal militant” who used to work for the ISI, but is now with Mullah Omar.
“Osama also likes him,” he says. “I believe he is on this flight, sir”.
This is where the series, along with ISI-Pakistan, adds the Afghanistan-Taliban-Al Qaeda dimension to the hijacking. And hereafter, whenever DRS talks about Amjad Farooqi’s Al Qaeda link and says that he would never work with ISI, the IB’s associate director Mukul Mohan (played by Manoj Pahwa and fashioned after Ajit Doval) says, “Sab ek hi thaili ke chatte-bhatte hain (Birds of a feather flock together.)”
“General’s revenge” was a much more compelling and neat story. An Afghanistan addendum would have muddied the water with a scary new enemy, one we weren’t even aware of.
In another scene in the series, Mukul Mohan says to his boss, “We should stick to ISI.”
“Aur press? (What about the press?)”
“Press ka kya hai sir, hamara official version agar Pakistan hoga, toh woh Pakistan bechegi (Don’t worry about the press, if we say Pakistan, it will sell that version.)
That’s what happened then and that’s what is happening now.
One victim, one villain was and remains an easier story to sell. It also served a purpose. It put all the attention on Pakistan as the evil supporter of terrorism, and cast the Indian government as the victim. And victims are not interrogated for their lapses, lapses like the 49 minutes when IC 814 was at Amritsar airport and Punjab Police commandos were about 300 meters from it, waiting to launch a rescue mission. Why wasn’t the rescue mission ordered? This is raised repeatedly in Sharan’s book.
When Bollywood gets real
Bollywood has made many movies and series based on real-life rescue missions, terrorist attacks, tragedies and triumphs. But few have faced the sort of intense scrutiny that IC 814 is being subjected to. One reason is that IC 814 is different from the usual stuff that Bollywood doles out and doesn’t indulge right wingers with cringy jingoism, which is de rigueur nowadays. The national anthem doesn’t come on at critical moments nor does the flag get waved at the end.
Barring the few filmy tangents that add nothing to the story, including the silly editor-reporter drama, IC 814 is a sharply written, intelligently directed series with some exceptional performances, including by the actors who play the three main hijackers. And by adding archival footage, the series gives heft to its claim of authenticity, and thus the robust scrutiny.
But the other, real reason why the series has made so many people in Lutyens Delhi uneasy is that it doesn’t toe the government’s “General’s revenge” theory and neither does it have a hero who saves the day.
Unlike the Sonam Kapoor starrer, Neerja, and Akshay Kumar’s Bell Bottom – both films about plane hijacking – there are no heroes in IC 814 except the pilot and his crew, and even they haven’t been framed like, say, if Akshay Kumar were playing the part of Captain Devi Sharan.
IC 814 is a different kind of bureaucratic procedural, one that is true to our desi reality. In the series, the unraveling of India’s political, bureaucratic and security establishment begins with a scene at Varanasi ATC where an officer brushes off information about the hijacking of the Kathmandu-Delhi flight as Delhi’s problem.
The series doesn’t fetishise India’s intelligence officers. It shows them as they were – powerful, important men who were clueless, having ignored warnings and cables.
For four of the series’ six episodes, Indian officials are mostly just trying to figure out who the hijackers are and who planned it, while waiting for ransom demands and instructions from the prime minister about what to do.
In the midst of a national crisis that’s arisen because of intelligence failure, we see officials take a few seconds to wish the minister on the birth of his grandchild, order rounds of chai, joke, laugh, bitch. We see conflict within the intelligence network – RAW and IB – and how the best intentions get tripped by big male egos and prejudices.
It’s these small details, the infusion of Indian reality and the humanity of all those involved – babus who, despite their petty concerns and bigoted worldview, get the job done, hijackers with divergent interests who kill, but also flirt with the air hostess, and a coalition government that is not in the prime minister’s control – that makes IC 814 a compelling watch.
Shattering silence
Amidst the thousands of tweets, loud TV shows and news stories that have slammed the series for what it shows and doesn’t show, sits a major issue that seems to have been ring-fenced as a no-go area.
Sinha’s IC 814 makes several choices that are political. It also has moments where its lapse of judgment is disturbing.
Towards the end, for example, it leans more towards Al Qaeda and minimises the ISI’s role in the hijacking.
But it also exonerates the Vajpayee government for its indecisions and lapses over the Amritsar rescue despite the fact that it was in Amritsar that two passengers were attacked by the hijackers, one of whom, Rupin Katyal, later died. The series even casts the hostage exchange as the best option the government had.
The series has faced non-stop trolling for not showing the hijackers addressing the hostages about the greatness of Islam or extolling the virtues of Osama bin Laden.
But the series also doesn’t show that a plane with NSG commandos took off for Amritsar at 7.55 pm on December 24, 1999, six minutes after IC 814 had taken off from Amritsar.
The silence on these questionable decisions and baffling events, which need to be answered by the government and not the series or Anubhav Sinha, is shattering.
Suparna Sharma is a senior journalist and film critic. Follow her at @SuparnaSharma