Netflix India content chief meets IB ministry after row over series based on IC-814 hijacking

New Delhi [India]September 3 (ANI): OTT platform Netflix India's head Monika Shergill will meet the Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting today. The meeting is being held in view of certain controversial issues in the web series based on the hijacking of IC-814. The meeting will be held at Shastri Bhawan.

“Nobody has the right to play with the feelings of the people of this nation. India's culture and civilisation should always be respected. One should think before portraying something in a wrong way. The government is taking this very seriously,” government sources said on the reason why Netflix's content head was summoned.

According to sources, the Netflix team has also brought research documents and footage collected for reference to the meeting. The OTT platform will put forward its view that the series is in line with publicly available sources and the information is taken from books and other government statements.

The Netflix series “IC-814 – The Airplane Hijacking in Kandahar” sparked a controversy on social media because of its portrayal of the hijackers.

In addition, Surjit Singh Yadav, leader of the Hindu Sena, had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Delhi High Court demanding a ban on the Netflix series.

The PIL alleged that the series distorts the actual identities of the terrorists involved in the kidnapping. The petition alleged that the miniseries falsely assigns Hindu names like 'Bhola' and 'Shankar' – names associated with the god Shiva – to the real kidnappers Ibrahim Akhtar, Shahid Akhtar Sayeed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Mistry and Shakir.

BJP politician Amit Malviya also criticised the series and said that filmmaker Anubhav Sinha was legitimising the kidnappers' criminal intentions.

“The hijackers of IC-814 were dreaded terrorists who adopted aliases to conceal their Muslim identities. Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha legitimized their criminal intentions by passing on their non-Muslim names. The result? Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814,” Malviya said in a post on X.

BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar expressed his joy that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had taken up the issue.

“I remember IC-814 vividly. I was very aware of that accident and very involved in tracking it down. Every man and woman in India and in South Asia knows that the hijacking of IC-814 from Kathmandu was carried out by terrorists backed by Pakistan's ISI. Nobody believes that the hijacking was carried out by people from India. How the people in that film have Hindu names, I don't know. But I am very happy that the IB Ministry and the Indian government have taken note of it and turned on Netflix,” Chandrasekhar said.

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

The six-part series is based on the events of December 24, 1999, when an Indian Airlines flight IC 814 en route from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked after taking off from Kathmandu Tribhuvan International Airport in Nepal, shortly after entering Indian airspace. (ANI)