‘IC814’ web series content row: IB Ministry summons Netflix Content Head

The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting on Monday has summoned the Netflix Content Head tomorrow, September 3, over a controversy surrounding the ‘IC-814 — The Kandahar Hijack’ web series, after the portrayal of hijackers in the series sparked outrage on social media.
The Broadcasting Ministry’s summon comes after a huge number of social media users accused the makers of the web series for deliberately changing the names of the hijackers to “Bhola” and “Shankar”.’IC 814′, is a webseries on the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by Pakistan-based terror outfit Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
Directed by Anubhav Sinha, the series has been inspired by the book Flight Into Fear: The Captain’s Story’, authored by Devi Sharan, the captain of the flight and journalist Srinjoy Chowdhury.
The web series revolves around the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 on December 24, 1999. The flight, carrying 191 passengers, took off from Kathmandu, Nepal, en route to Delhi. Shortly after takeoff, five hijackers, disguised as passengers, seized control of the aircraft. The plane subsequently made multiple stops in Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before being diverted to Kandahar, Afghanistan.
During the 1999 hijacking, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was compelled to release three notorious terrorists—Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar—from Indian prisons to secure the hostages’ release. Reports indicate that the Taliban assisted the hijackers and the freed terrorists in reaching Pakistan.
A statement from the Union Home Ministry dated January 6, 2000, identified the hijackers as Ibrahim Athar, Shahid Akhtar Sayed, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Mistri Zahoor Ibrahim, and Shakir.
BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya criticized the depiction, stating that the hijackers were notorious terrorists who used aliases to conceal their Muslim identities.
“Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha has legitimized their criminal intent by highlighting their non-Muslim names,” Malviya posted on X. “In the future, people might believe that Hindus were behind the IC-814 hijacking,” he added.
Malviya accused the Left of attempting to whitewash the actions of Pakistani terrorists and suggested that cinema, used aggressively by Communists since the 1970s, is being leveraged to shift blame and undermine India’s security.
Reactiing to the post, Kangana Ranaut on Monday said there is freedom for communists or leftists for anti national expressions but OTT platform don’t let nationalist express their views
She shared on X, Law of the land is that one can show unimaginable amount of violence and nudity on OTT platforms without any consequence or censorship, one can even distort real life events to suit their politically motivated sinister motives, there is all the freedom for communists or leftists across the world for such anti national expressions but as a nationalist no OTT platform allows us to make films that revolves around the integrity and unity of Bharat, it seems censorship is only for some of us who don’t want tukde of this nation and make films on historic facts. It’s hugely demotivating and unjust.