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The hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was dramatised in the recent Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, which gave a glimpse not only of what transpired inside the aircraft across eight days, but also in the corridors of power. Since the show’s release, several people involved in the incident, including captain Devi Sharan, former R&AW chief AS Dulat, the then Punjab Police top cop Sarabjit Singh, and many passengers, have recalled their memories. One passenger, Jeevan Bhatt, recently said that the hostages experienced a level of Stockholm Syndrome during the ordeal, and recalled that everybody contributed cash for the ‘poor Afghans’ who’d been dragged into the mess.
In an interview with the Face to Face YouTube channel, the passenger said that some hostages even participated in games and told jokes to the hijackers. “Burger was the kingpin. He would come around and say, ‘You look upset, let’s sing songs and tell jokes’. Basically everybody inside the plane was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. One man from Karol Bagh even promised to print pamphlets for their cause the minute he got back to India. They kept telling us about the atrocities that Indian forces had committed against Kashmiris, and said that they would never stoop to that level because they’re good people,” he recalled in Hindi.
He continued, “You won’t believe it; they told us that people in Afghanistan are in such poor condition, and urged us to contribute money for them. They took donations from the passengers! I think they collected around Rs 80,000. Everybody contributed. The airhostesses would walk down the aisles with bags, and we pooled in our cash. It was around 80,000 — a big amount even back then. It was all for the poor people in Kandahar.” Jeevan Bhatt said that one hijacker, the same one who killed the hostage Rupin Katyal, also tried to preach Islam to everybody. “He conducted two sessions, I think. This was the same hijacker who killed Rupin Katyal. They would say that Masood Azhar is a writer, and has falsely been branded as a terrorist,” he said.
Vijay Varma (right) and Rajiv Thakur (left) in a still from Netflix’s IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack.
In a recent interview with India Today TV, another passenger, the Chandigarh-based Pooja Kataria, corroborated Jeevan’s comments about donating money. “They [hijackers] really insisted that Afghanistan was very poor, and we should do charity for them. So, we collected 85,000 from all the passengers and gave it to them for Afghanistan,” she said.
In his memoirs, the flight engineer Anil K Jaggia recalled what happened on the last day, after negotiations with Indian authorities had successfully ended. He wrote, “At about 3.00 p.m. Burger came out of the cockpit and addressed the passengers. He apologised for the hijack and the agony they had been forced to bear. He bid them goodbye. He even asked them to pray for his safe journey. As he walked down the aisle exchanging pleasantries with the passengers, he came up beside me in seat 25B. ‘I’m sorry for causing you any trauma,’ he said sincerely.”
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