Vijay Varma played the role of IC 814 Captain Devi Sharan in IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack.
Captain Devi Sharan, who was the pilot of the IC 814 flight that was hijacked in December 1999, opened up about the series.
IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack has been grabbing eyeballs since its release. The series, which attempts to narrate the incidents that took place during the December 1999 Kandahar hijack, faces backlash over allegations that Anubhav Sinha series of changing the terrorists’ names into non-Muslim names and ‘whitewashed’ the harrowing incident. Amid these claims, Captain Devi Sharan, who was the pilot of the hijacked flight, opened up about two incidents that were shown in the series but did not happen in reality.
The series showed that the pilot, played by Vijay Varma, had unclogged the plumbing lines and received a salute from the foreign minister after the seige ended. However, in a new interview, Devi Sharan revealed that these two incidents played out differently in real life.
“I did not fix the plumbing lines myself. They (Taliban authorities) sent a worker. I took him down into the aircraft hold as he would not know where the lines were,” Sharan told The Telegraph. Speaking about the scene involving the foreign minister, Sharan said, “(Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh) made a gesture that showed appreciation of our efforts.”
For the unversed, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is based on the harrowing hijack of an India-bound flight in December 1999. The flight took off from Kathmandu and was headed to New Delhi when it was hijacked. The passengers and crew were held hostage for seven days. The hijackers demanded the release three high-profile militants: Maulana Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar. The negotiations resulted in the release of the three militants in exchange of the release of the hostages. There was one fatality in the hijack.
The series has been facing calls for ‘boycott’ over allegations that the makers tampered with the names of the hijackers. A source told ANI that a Netflix representative was summoned to New Delhi on September 2, over the backlash the series is facing.
