Netflix’s Operation Safed Sagar has been one of the best-received Indian shows in recent years. The war drama focuses on the Indian Air Force’s eponymous operation during the Kargil War, which turned the tide of the conflict in India’s favour. Based on real operations and with real people, the show managed to present an unseen part of India’s modern history to the audience.
How a Golden Arrows film became Operation Safed Sagar
The story of Operation Safed Sagar’s making is just as expansive and intensive as the show itself, something that involved the men and women who made it to devote close to five years of their lives to the project, taking them to 16000 feet above sea level, and almost at the doorstep of Kargil itself. Co-creator and showrunner Abhijeet recalls their 2021 meeting. He said, ‘I have only 2 hours, and I can’t pack all of this’. In January 2022, writing on the show finally began, and it would stretch on for almost two years. Contrary to their expectations, Netflix was open to the idea of making it and asked for 10-20 pages to read. True to themselves, the Safed Sagar team sent them a 95-page document. Within two weeks, the show was greenlit, and the work on the script finally began in June 2022. The real war would not even begin till episode 4 of 6. For the Indian Air Force, their standard of depiction of the force on the big screen is the 1982 film Vijeta.
The writing was still underway when the decision to pitch the show to Netflix was made, because, as the creators say, ‘if anyone would be able to pull this one off, it’s going to be Netflix’. Abhijeet Singh Parmar and Mehboob Pal Singh of Feel Good Films give Hindustan Times a deep dive into the five years they spent making the show. The push was for a show, but Kushal, an IAF veteran himself, wanted to make a film. He only came around after he met the Indian Air Force top brass later that year, and they also suggested a show. This forced the makers to make sure the focus stays as much on the pilots as it is on the operations. Mehboob and Abhijeet admit that the scale gave them time to build the characters and their world. As Mehboob explains, “I never looked at it as the war story or the event story of the war, of us winning the war. For me, it was always about the human beings behind the war and what happens to them and what happens to people who get involved or pulled into a war like that. The final test for the team was meeting a standard set decades before they even conceptualised the show. That is why we are opening the world to you,” recalls Mehboob. When the show premiered, and most of the top brass saw it, they agreed the show’s team had lived up to that promise. Operation Safed Sagar is streaming on Netflix.
“We read the script, and we came across the details of the war, and I said, ‘None of these details is in the script’. “They said you have to be as good as it, if not better. What is Operation Safed Sagar today was conceptualised by co-creator Kushal Srivastava as a film on the Golden Arrows, the Indian Air Force squadron that carried out the dangerous bombing missions during the War.
