The most important prop in Netflix series “Operation Safed Sagar” isn’t a fighter jet. It’s a wing badge.
When creator and showrunner Abhijeet Singh Parmar first sat down with Alka Ahuja – widow of Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, who was killed in the 1999 Kargil War – he and his team arrived with a list of some 70 to 100 questions. They asked none of them. Every wall of her home was, in his words, a museum to her husband: a medal here, a trophy there, a photograph on every surface. All the team could offer was an open invitation for her to speak.
“All we asked her was, ‘Ma’am, whatever you want to tell us about sir,'” Parmar says. What she told them became part of “Operation Safed Sagar,” and Ahuja later entrusted the production with her husband’s original wing badge, now worn on screen by star Siddharth. “I know that rather than having just a very good story to tell, this is also a huge responsibility in someone’s real life,” Parmar adds.
That gesture of trust threads through Netflix India‘s six-episode series, which premiered on Thursday at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi ahead of its Friday streaming release. Created and showrun by Parmar and Kushal Srivastava, directed by Oni Sen and produced by Matchbox Shots LLP and Feel Good Films, the show follows a brotherhood of fighter pilots and the political maneuvering behind enemy lines as India mounts what became the world’s highest air operation. It dramatizes the Indian Air Force’s role in the Kargil War, the 1999 conflict fought in the high-altitude Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir after Pakistani soldiers and militants crossed the Line of Control and occupied positions on the Indian side, a chapter Netflix says has rarely been explored on screen given that most prior portrayals centered on the Army.
