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The release of Anubhav Sinha’s new streaming series, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, has reintroduced the harrowing incident to the minds of Indian audiences. The six-episode series, based in part on Captain Devi Sharan’s account of the week-long siege, was released to positive reviews on August 29. In the show, the captain is played by Vijay Varma, while the rest of the impressive cast plays various bureaucrats who found themselves working around a system to ensure the safe return of Indian citizens. The stand-off ended on December 31, 1999, and Captain Devi Sharan got a hero’s welcome in India.
In an interview with The New York Times five days after his return, he spoke about the mood inside the plane, and recalled that the hijackers and hostages began to loosen up as the days wore on. He even recalled telling the hijackers a joke, which he narrated in the interview as well. “I just wanted to make the best of that time, so that nobody should be nervous and think the world is finished now,” he said, recalling how the hijacker named Burger ‘won the hearts of people’ by singing songs with them and chatting ‘companionably’. Captain Sharan, too, ‘joined in the games’.
He added, “Whenever the hijackers laughed, we laughed. Whenever they were tense, we were tense.” Captain Sharan then recalled the joke that he told during one of these interactions with the hijackers and hostages. “Like one guy was traveling with a parrot. See, an air hostess comes, so the parrot kisses her. OK? The master of that parrot thinks I can also do that. He also kisses her. The commander comes out and asks, ‘Why did you do this?’ The master says, ‘Because my parrot did that.’ So the commander decided to throw them both out of the plane, the parrot and the master. They opened the door. The parrot asks his master, ‘Can you fly?'”
Captain Sharan, who began flying only a few days after the ordeal, declared in the NYT interview that he was prepared to return to work, and that he was ‘ready to face another hijack also’. In more recent interviews, director Anubhav Sinha also shared anecdotes that he gathered from his interactions with Captain Sharan, who told him about the camaraderie that emerged in the cabin as the siege wore on, and about the mark that remains on his neck from where the hijackers kept him at gunpoint.
In 1999, a passenger airliner from Kathmandu was hijacked by a group of terrorists, eventually landing in Kandahar. There, the Indian authorities engaged the hijackers in negotiations, ultimately agreeing to release three high-ranking terrorists in exchange of the hostages. One person was murdered.
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