The Indian government has summoned the content head of OTT platform Netflix over the series ‘IC-814 — The Kandahar Hijack’, which has triggered a row over depiction of hijackers.

Official sources said the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has summoned the content head of Netflix India on Tuesday, seeking an explanation on the allegedly contentious aspects of the OTT series, a PTI report from New Delhi stated.

The depiction of hijackers of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Delhi has kicked off a row with a section of viewers objecting to the ‘humane’ projection of the perpetrators.

BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya said the hijackers of IC-814 were dreaded terrorists, who acquired aliases to hide their Muslim identities.

“Filmmaker Anubhav Sinha, legitimised their criminal intent, by furthering their non-Muslim names,” Malviya posted on X. “Decades later, people will think Hindus hijacked IC-814,” he said.

“Left’s agenda to whitewash the crimes of Pakistani terrorists, all Muslims, served. This is the power of cinema, which the Communists have been using aggressively, since the 70s. Perhaps even earlier,” Malviya said.

“This will not just weaken/put in question India’s security apparatus in the long run, but also shift the blame away from the religious cohort that is responsible for all the bloodshed,” he said.

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said it was really amusing to see the people who took movies like ‘Kashmir Files’ as the gospel truth having a melt down at the way the events of IC814 are depicted in the Netflix show.

“Now suddenly they want accuracy and nuance packaged in the script,” Abdullah said on X.

Meanwhile, on September 1, amid demands by a section of social media users for boycott of the series for allegedly hiding the real identities of the terrorists involved in the 1999 incident, casting director Mukesh Chhabra claimed the perpetrators used nicknames for each other and proper research was done for the show.

Directed by Anubhav Sinha, the series is based on the 1999 hijack of an Indian aircraft by five terrorists on December 24, 1999, 40 minutes after it took off from Kathmandu. It started streaming on Netflix from August 29.

Chhabra, a prominent casting director in the industry, said the terrorists used “nicknames or fake names” to address each other.

“I am reading so many tweets about the names of the hijackers. We did the proper research. They used to call each other by those names—nicknames or fake names, whatever you want to call them. And thank you, everyone, for loving the ensemble cast. A big thank you to my team, and especially to Anubhav Sinha for trusting us and giving me the freedom to explore. #IC814 #Netflix,” he wrote on X.

Five terrorists Ibrahim Athar, Sunny Ahmed Qazi, Zahoor Ibrahim, Shahid Akhter and Sayed Shakir hijacked the IC-814 plane during its flight from Kathmandu to Delhi on December 24, 1999.