Hindi entertainment news this month has been virtually monopolised by director Anubhav Sinha’s IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, a series on the real-life hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight by Pakistani terrorists in 1999. Among other accusations, right-wingers have charged Sinha with masking the hijackers’ Muslim identities by giving them Hindu names on the show. 

In truth, these were code names used by the real hijackers, and IC 814 never leaves us in doubt that they are Muslim. Still, the government summoned a Netflix India official in response to the social media outrage. 

Ironically, IC 814 does not exactly live up to Sinha’s track record of no-holds-barred truth-telling in films. The pressure on him as a storyteller is evident in the pains the show takes to absolve the Bharatiya Janata Party of blame for what experts have described as the failure of the Indian administration at all levels during this saga. BJP was the principal party in the then National Democratic Alliance government headed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

IC 814 does have some interesting qualities – for one, its naturalistic tone. It’s almost like a government procedural. Sinha has also not caricatured the hijackers in the ridiculous way that Indian Muslims and Pakistanis are caricatured in nationalist Hindi cinema. However, characters on the show are made to repeatedly state that coalition politics was the reason for the NDA government’s indecisiveness. Archival footage of Vajpayee making a routine comment is played on screen, but there is no character modelled on him in the narrative. The fictionalised version of then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, played by actor Pankaj Kapur, is portrayed as a good soul who is helpless at the hands of a bumbling bureaucracy and the pressures imposed on his party by – guess what – a coalition government.

Given this, why did the Right go after IC 814? 

As online chatter indicates, there is a feeling on that side of the ideological divide that the terrorists in the series are not shown to be sufficiently evil. More to the point, in a decade in which the Hindi industry has disgraced itself by pandering to the Narendra Modi-led BJP government and the right-wing, Sinha has been one of the rare voices of dissent emerging from the industry through his filmography. His debut streaming venture is, therefore, being targeted not only for its content but also for his past performance. 

The brouhaha over IC 814 is inevitable in an India where the rise of the Right has coincided with the Hindi film industry’s descent into an abyss of abject capitulation. This moment calls for an examination, though, of the current public perception of Hindi cinema and its creators, which is understandably dominated by stars bowing before the government, scripts rewriting history to suit the Sangh Parivar’s narrative, and films peddling fake news, Islamophobia and establishment PR.