ANUBHAV SINHA has a penchant for social drama. The second half of his filmography (starting with Mulk in 2018) is dotted with films rooted in social reality and embellished for commentary.

However, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, his new six-debut show, is based on an actual event. On December 24, 1999 an airbus from Nepal, headed to Delhi, was overtaken by terrorists. It was made to stop at several cities, Amritsar included, till it finally landed at Kandahar in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The demand, among other things, was the release of three Islamist terrorists imprisoned in India. After seven days of negotiation, the Indian government acceded to it.

Any caveat that reads variations of “based on real-life incidents” is bad news of late. Drawing from the past has become a fatalistic exercise for filmmakers to inherit incidents from history and create misleading heroes and villains. Sinha is not that filmmaker. He has also chosen an event that makes it difficult to fit into a neat template of heroism. Although there was one casualty among the 176 passengers and the hostages were eventually set free, the Kandahar hijack is viewed as an instance of diplomatic failure. The three terrorists set free in the bargain — Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar — went on to be involved in various heinous activities later like the Parliament attack in 2001, the Mumbai attack in 2008 and the Pulwama attack later in 2019, among others.

Choosing to retell such a story is difficult because it is also reckoned with the possibility that it will be designed as a series of anti-climax. But it is easy to understand why someone like Sinha, a popular anti-establishment voice, makes that choice. If Hindi cinema veered towards propaganda in the last couple of years it has also cherry-picked India’s retaliation against attacks caused by those terrorists who were freed during the hijack. By going back to the start, the filmmaker insists that if things were handled better in 1999 there would have been no need to strike back later. If the nation had responded in time then there would have been no need to overcompensate with militant nationalism.

On the eve of Christmas, a flight from Nepal gets hijacked, and officers from the Intelligence Bureau, crisis management group, and ministries of external affairs come together to handle the crisis. The show unfolds in real time, much like Sinha’s 2023 film Bheed where the extent of the pandemic revealed itself during the runtime. There was a deftness with which it was done back then, infusing the narrative with sparse details like all the characters were being privy to new information every passing minute. But in IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, the skill is replaced with a heavy-handedness. The first couple of minutes of the series seems like one exposition dump after another like the captain (Vijay Varma) telling the air hostess (Patralekha) that he was not supposed to be on the flight and that his family lives in Hyderabad. The excess of information does not sit with the scene, and this is the first of many such instances.

This lack of restraint is visible even in the show’s gratuitous use of a voiceover that fills in information that could have been woven into the story. Archival footage is freely used and so is the narrative device. But the bigger problem with IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is its ambivalence. Sinha approaches the incident with a centristic view, underlining the good intentions of the officials involved and also never leaning too much on the oversight at the helm. We only see footage of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Prime Minister of the country, stating in no uncertain terms that India would not negotiate with terrorists. We get an idea that something more could have been done and that having a coalition government at the top (much like now) delayed making certain decisions.

But Sinha’s refusal to take sides translates as non-committal storytelling where the past is not streamlined with intent. It remains unclear whose story The Kandahar Hijack is telling. Is it the passengers (there is, obviously, an old man who can’t breathe, a newly-wed couple, a specially-abled child with an unwilling father), is it the pilot whose reputation gets soiled during the seven days (we see his wife and children watching the news with trepidation) or is it the bunch of officials who await orders? The answer could be that it is everyone’s story but it does not become one because the characters do not register. As a result, the host of competent actors that Sinha assembled (Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Arvind Swamy, Dibyendu Bhattacharya) feel shortchanged.

Along with this, there are two narratives (one with the ISI in Nepal and the other with two journalists negotiating their morality regarding the hijack) that feel convoluted and unnecessary. One is tempted to compare this with Hansal Mehta’s work for how similar they feel and yet how disparate. Faraaz (2022; which he directed) or Lootere (2024; which he co-created), for instance, and it becomes clear. Both these outings are shaped by politics and designed with intent. Mehta showcased a closed-fist commitment to the cultural milieu (consider the casting) that added to their overall merit. Sinha’s streaming debut feels too crowded and unsure, too detached and ambivalent to soar.

IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is currently streaming on Netflix.

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