A review of IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack
December 1999. As the millennium year approaches, India is tackling fractious coalition politics, and the Kargil War has just passed. New Delhi has slowed down for the winter, and relations are appropriately frosty with Islamabad and Washington. But something sinister is brewing in Kathmandu. As Christmas Eve rolls around, Indian Airlines flight IC 814 from Kathmandu to Delhi is hijacked by armed assailants in service of a then-yet-unknown cause.
The events of that winter are recounted in IC814: The Kandahar Hijack, a six-part Netflix series by Anubhav Sinha and Trishant Srivastava. The show takes us through the seven-day ordeal and diplomatic storm that was triggered by India’s last major hijacking. Five terrorists associated with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) hijacked IC 814 briefly after it entered Indian airspace and took the 179 passengers and 11 crew members hostage. The aircraft touched down in Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before being flown to Taliban-controlled Kandahar. After a week-long back and forth, the Vajpayee government released 3 terrorists – Maulana Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar – in return for the hostages. The three have since gone on to orchestrate multiple terror attacks, including the 2001 Parliament Attack, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2019 Pulwama Attack. Based on flight captain Devi Sharan’s book Flight into Fear, the show oscillates between the harrowing developments within the flight and scurried damage control efforts in South Block.
Reading the (crisis management) Room
Bureaucratic paralysis. That is the immediate and overwhelming narrative that IC 814 wants you to feel. Inter-organizational strife, administrative carelessness, and the indecisiveness of coalition politics colour the ordeal. An intelligence bureaucracy caught napping and an administration mired in jurisdictional conflicts seemingly accompanied the flight from Kathmandu to Amritsar and beyond. The ‘chai samosa-ness’ of babudom, even in crisis, is something of a whispered joke in Delhi’s policy circles, and the series employs it liberally. If one must get into the Bollywood-esque ‘good guy-bad guy’ of it all – and we do so only because IC814 does in its depiction of the babus – the bureaucracy gets the short end of the stick. The casting of comedic-veteran Manoj Pahwa in the role of IB Additional Director and chief negotiator Mukul Mohan seemingly reflects this choice. A self-satisfied veneer accompanies them as they try to pass the buck, save face, and are generally swept along where the currents take them.
IC 814 presents a world so familiar yet alien to the modern audience. It reflects a pre-9/11 reality that is a now distant memory. The threat perception around an aeroplane hijack in IC 814’s world is completely different from today’s. You find yourself repeatedly recalling it to reconcile with the more mind-boggling developments. The fact that India has never faced another hijacking of similar magnitude again likely owes more to the changes wrought by 9/11 than IC 814
The show goes easier on the diplomats. A suave Aravind Swamy (as MEA secretary DRS) and empathetic Pankaj Kapur (Foreign Minister Vijaybhan Singh) play, respectively, the most efficient and compassionate people in the room. On the other hand, then chief negotiator and current NSA Ajit Doval has since gone on record to criticise the incident as a “diplomatic failure” – that the foreign minister and foreign secretary failed to assert sufficient diplomatic pressure on the US and the UAE and articulate the seriousness of the terrorists’ background. The geopolitical terrain of the time – in the aftermath of Kargil and the Pokhran tests – troubles the show’s embattled Foreign Minister (based on Jaswant Singh). There are no victorious notes here, either. He smooth-talks, beseechingly, for cooperation and garners small wins, if any.
The show goes easiest on the political leadership. For obvious reasons. Besides Jaswant Singh, no other central ministers find representation, least of all PM Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister Advani even less. The word “coalition government” has been dropped multiple times, and it is an abstract, one-note explanation for all ailments. The political fallout of the concession marked the incident as one of many that would come to characterise the coalition era of the 2000s. The indecision on-screen triggers all-too-familiar memories that have coalesced to make “coalition government” a bad word in Indian politics.
The Geopolitical Fray in Hindsight
It is never mentioned, but yet-to-occur 9/11 is the unsaid, looming presence permeating the narrative proceedings of IC 814. Osama bin Laden’s (contested) involvement in the hijacking is introduced with a sense of doom meant to be felt with the benefit of hindsight. The events of IC 814 occurred three years into OBL’s declaration of Jihad against America and two years before it burst the world open through the Twin Tower strikes of September 2001. In this world, a stray news clipping still reads, “Osama bin Laden: genuine threat or convenient distraction?”
It is why IC 814 presents a world so familiar yet alien to the modern audience. It reflects a pre-9/11 reality that is a now distant memory. The threat perception around an aeroplane hijack in IC 814’s world is completely different from today’s. You find yourself repeatedly recalling it to reconcile with the more mind-boggling developments. The fact that India has never faced another hijacking of similar magnitude again likely owes more to the changes wrought by 9/11 than IC 814. In many ways, the Kandahar hijacking is among the first warning shots of the rise of global jihad that went on to define the new millennium. You can almost imagine the show tipping a mocking hat to the US for not taking it seriously enough.
Today, at the time of this article’s writing in January 2025, Captain Devi Sharan has just retired from active service. In the 25 intervening years, the geopolitical landscape of the subcontinent has changed as much as it has not in some ways. The Taliban in Afghanistan and coalition politics in India have both exited and staged a comeback. Relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan have circled back to where they were in 1999 but shifted considerably with the US and UAE. Would today’s India have found it easier to prevail upon the US and the UAE for assistance? How would the world react to an IC 814 in the post-9/11 world? Counterfactuals only go so far. A quarter century later, even at this retrial of the event in public court, much remains unknown about the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC 814.
IC 814 in the Public Eye
Much has been written about IC 814’s star cast of character actors, and they deliver restrained, believable performances. The writing eschews melodrama, although it strains to contain the sheer number of angles explored. In the quest to articulate the ambiguities of the situation, one too many loose ends are introduced and abandoned despite the possibilities offered by fictional liberties. The portrayal of the newsroom, too, suffers a similar trajectory. The intent is well-placed – ‘India Headlines’ represents the electoral conscience, the feisty advocate for accountability that’s owed to the public. However, it mostly serves as a lecture on the pitfalls of the media’s insistence on transparency. It almost feels like a half-hearted effort to ‘balance’ the show’s heavy criticism of the administrative apparatus.
The big story, however, has been the depiction of the terrorists, criticised for their “humanistic” portrayal – one is a crazed brother, the other displays a soft corner for an air hostess, and by day six, they are playing antakshari with the hostages. More acutely, the use of their code names – Chief, Burger, Doctor, Bhola, and Shankar – courted controversy as an attempted whitewashing of the hijackers’ Islamic identities. However, most of the above are matters of recorded history, and the terrorists’ Islamist credentials never really come into doubt within the world of the show. The series is a largely measured portrayal of “villainy” that often is prone to caricature.
Indian Intelligence’s Winter of Discontent
At its core, IC814: The Kandahar Hijack is a potent retelling of an uncomfortable saga in India’s recent history. It is difficult to watch in that way, beyond the obvious violence. Most things that could go wrong went wrong. In the end, the officials are left wondering about their legacy, whether they even fought or won. By virtue of how history has panned out since the outcome of IC 814, it would constitute a loss. Masood Azhar, in particular, has gone on to add injury to insult.
Early on, as news of the hijacking is still coming in, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) is shown knee-deep, begrudgingly, in the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) inquiries. Elsewhere, a journalist scribbles information about the hijack on an old newspaper clipping which reads “The Kargil Debacle: It’s time to hold Intel Agencies accountable.” The show makes a clear choice about who it blames, but more importantly, it is a pointed portrayal of the mood of the Union that winter.
The scramble in the Crisis Management Group reflects the embattled decade India’s security establishment had had – the peaks of the Kashmir militancy, “death by a thousand cuts”, the heydays of Dawood and the mafia, all culminating in Kargil. We now know the new millennium would usher in the global War on Terror and the peak of India’s terror-stricken years with 26/11. However, in those dying days of the 20th century, the world barely registered the tenuous fates of 170 odd souls enmired in a South Asian tragedy – a plane was hijacked, Bin Laden may have been involved, a fledgling plan to crash into a government building. Turns out, IC 814 was an eerie premonition of the fast-spreading branches of global jihad and the decades nations would spend taming it.
