It is a measure of how polarised our discourse—and much of our society perhaps—has become that the controversy over the Netflix series about the IC 814 hijacking has followed predictably ideological lines.
On one side are what might be called the voices of the Hindu Right wing. They object to the show and many want it boycotted or banned because the script does not make it clear that the hijackers were Muslims.
In one scene, the hijackers offer up such nicknames for themselves as Bhola and Shankar. This has led to a social media uproar, especially among those who have not watched the show and claim that the series is pretending that the hijackers were Hindus, thereby demeaning the Hindu community.
As this controversy has raged, there has been a response from people on the so-called liberal side, defending the show, praising its realism and authenticity and defending it for its determination “to tell the real story”.
Both parties are wrong. And their positions are mostly idiotic.
Accuracy problems
The Hindu nicknames offered up by the hijackers were obviously false. But they did actually use such names to describe themselves. To faithfully record this fact on the screen is not to demean the Hindu community but to merely record what happened.
Equally, the liberal response that the series is true to the facts and (despite a few creative liberties) tells us what really happened is no more than a knee-jerk response to the Hindu Right wing’s campaign.
There are two elements to the series. The first is the reconstruction of what took place inside the aeroplane. This is, apparently, based on a memoir by the pilot and though there have been varying recollections among passengers of what actually transpired, I am willing to accept that this is a sincere depiction of events.
My problem is with the second element of the series: Its account of what happened on the ground. This is inaccurate, and often childish and silly.
It is also a lie. The deliberate evasions and inventions turn the whole show into an expensive PR job for the ISI.
That, rather than the Hindu-Muslim aspect, is my objection to the series. If you tell lies about an extremely important event in India’s recent history to a generation that is too young to remember what actually happened, your falsehoods and untruths become the accepted version and the truth is buried.
Yes, the hijackers did use Hindu aliases. So that is accurate. But nowhere does the show tell us what their real names were. In fact, the Government of India has publicly named them: Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Shakir, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, and Ibrahim Athar.
The show does not even tell us that these men were Pakistanis and that, a couple of days into the hijack, Indian intelligence agencies had identified them as Pakistani operatives and even knew which parts of Pakistan they came from.
Instead, the show seeks vaguely and unconvincingly to link the hijackers to Afghanistan and even to Al Qaeda, suggesting that the hijacking was part of some grand plan hatched by Osama bin Laden and that, if ISI was involved, then it was in a very junior position.
This is a straight-out lie. The hijacking was an ISI operation, part of the covert war that Pakistan has waged against India for decades.
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The inaccuracies pile up
You can tell which route the narrative intends to take when it shows an Indian agent (described as a first officer in the embassy—no such post exists) tracking a Pakistani diplomat. But the Pakistani, we then learn, is a mere minion; the true leader of the plot is an Afghan.
This storyline, unsupported by any convincing factual evidence that I have seen in 25 years, is used to suggest that R&AW had advance intelligence about the plot and that an Indian agent even tried to stop the plane from taking off. This is a lie.
R&AW is then shown resorting to torturing Nepalese civilians to extract information about the plot. All of this is fabricated. It is not some ‘creative liberty’.
These fabrications are integral to the series’ message: Yes, the terrorists may have been bad men but the other side (i.e., the Indian government) was not much better—incompetent fools who were also torturers.
It is a strange position for an Indian TV series made for an Indian audience to take without any solid evidence to back it up.
The other scenes set in Delhi unfold like they were written by a 12-year-old who has never seen a government office. The foreign minister, meant to be Jaswant Singh, sits under a large signboard that says ‘Ministry of External Affairs’ in his own office as though he is a receptionist at the Passport Office.
It is from this office that the Jaswant Singh character plays a key role in fashioning the Indian response to the hijacking. This is another fabrication because the only role Jaswant Singh played in the saga, right till the end, was to try and ask the world to help us (it did not). He was not a major part of the security response.
The inaccuracies pile up: The Kathmandu torturer turns up in Delhi to meet the R&AW chief and clicks his heels at the end of the meeting as though he is a cadet taking his NCC exam. (Or maybe he is on loan from the Gestapo.) Nobody involved with the show seems to have any idea of how the intelligence agencies or the Government of India function; we are not a military-run state like Pakistan.
There is zero research on display, only fabrications.
Nor do they know much about newspapers. An unnecessary subplot, which serves no narrative purpose except to give Dia Mirza a role, completely misunderstands what newspapers and their offices were like in 1999. It is clear that, in this area too, the makers did no research at all.
By the end, the show is even more clear in its message: It was all to do with Al Qaeda and the Afghans. When the hijackers finally got what they wanted, they celebrated with Osama bin Laden, the narration tells us, and the ISI was so out of things that it wasn’t even invited to the celebration.
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What actually happened
In fact, the hijacking was masterminded by the brother of jihadi ideologue Masood Azhar to secure his brother’s release from an Indian prison. R&AW and the Indian government had worked this out by the second day of the hijacking.
The other terrorists who were eventually released with Masood in return for the passengers on IC 814 were also Pakistani assets. Omar Sheikh, who returned to Pakistan where he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, and Mushtaq Zargar (‘Latram’) who was used by the ISI to foment trouble in Kashmir.
The three released terrorists were helped by the Taliban to go to Pakistan where they received a warm welcome. Masood Azhar even attended a public function in his honour.
So why would an Indian TV show play down all this? Why would it focus on an unlikely Al Qaeda connection to let ISI off the hook? Why would it tell so many lies?
I doubt if the makers of the show were motivated by a desire to subvert the truth. I think they just did not know any better. They worked from a script that included these evasions and lies and because they knew nothing about the subject, believed, in their naivety, that this was what really happened.
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The real question
I don’t necessarily accept all the conspiracy theories that are floating around. Yes, the series was filmed in Jordan with the cooperation of the country’s film board but I would be wary of reading too much into that.
Likewise, with the allegations about Adrian Levy, the British journalist who wrote the story and who, Indian agencies believe, is sympathetic to the ISI. (In his book, Spy Stories, India and R&AW come off very badly with suggestions about their communal bias and the ISI comes off much better; but that alone is no proof of any ISI sympathies.)
What is clear is that nobody involved in the show bothered to speak to anyone of consequence who was portrayed in it. They relied on the pilot’s account for scenes set inside the plane and just made up the rest.
Admittedly, many of the principals are dead but those who are alive (AS Dulat, then-R&AW chief; Ajit Doval, who handled the ground negotiations; and Anand Arni, who went to Kandahar on behalf of R&AW and others) were not consulted. Many of them are surprised by the distortions and inaccuracies in the series.
Of course, the Indian security establishment screwed up. But the biggest screw-up (letting IC 814 take off from Amritsar) demonstrated layers of indecisiveness and ineptitude that are not reflected in the script. Instead, we are fed bogus stories about secret tape recordings and torture in Kathmandu.
So forget all the Hindu-Muslim stuff. That’s just a social media red herring. Focus on the real question: Why did Netflix allow a whitewash job for the ISI to get made?
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)