Netflix series on Kandahar hijacking is an expensive PR job for Pakistan's ISI, a straight-out lie, says Vir Sanghvi

IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, the series, is loosely based on the 1999 hijack of the Indian aircraft IC 814 by five terrorists.

The makers of the series faced the wrath of netizens who claimed the Pakistani terrorists' names of the hijackers were deliberately changed to "Bhola” and “Shankar”, after Hindu god Lord Shiva.

However, the veteran journalist has flagged some crucial factual anomalies beyond the polarised Hindu right wing versus Liberal discourse.

He said in a long blog post on his website, "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.

"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."

Sanghvi has lashed out at the makers for not even mentioning the attackers were Pakistanis though the Indian intelligence agencies had clearly mentioned that the operatives were from the neighbouring country.

"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?" he asked. 

"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," he wrote.

"This story-line, 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’," he wrote.

"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 up this story-line," the senior journalist added.

"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: 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 (they 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," he wrote.

"That, rather than the Hindu-Muslim aspect, is my objection to the series. If you tell lies about an extremely important event in our 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," the former Indian editor said.

Vir Sanghvi is a senior Indian journalist and former editor. Photo courtesy: Virsangvi.com

Sanghvi wrote, "The Hindu nicknames offered up by the hijackers were obviously false. But they did actually use such names as Bhola and Shankar to describe themselves. To faithfully record this fact on the screen is not to demean the Hindu community but to record what actually 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 counter response to the Hindu right wing’s campaign."

He, however, said he does not necessarily accept all the conspiracy theories that are floating around.

"Yes, the series was filmed in Jordan with the cooperation of that 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.)," he wrote.

The series is directed by Anubhav Sinha and written by Adrian Levy and Trishant Srivastava.

Produced by Sarita Patil and Sanjay Routray under Matchbox Shots and Benaras Mediaworks, it stars an ensemble cast led by Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Vijay Varma, Dia Mirza and Arvind Swamy.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had summoned Netflix content head Monika Shergill over the controversy.