Two months into the Kargil War, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif determines to see with his eyes what his heart already suspects: that they're losing the battle. At Skardu base, he's received by Maj Gen Javed Hassan, who invites him to the officer's mess for a briefing. Sharif fixes with a stare and says, "The truth of democracy is revealed at the polling booth, and the reality of war in the hospital.” The condition of the wounded and general despondency in the hospital tent tells him all he needs to know, prompting a rare act of rebellion and a covert trip to Washington.
It's rare that a Pakistani authority figure gets a moment like this in an Indian series. Operation Safed Sagar has already made clear that Sharif is a weak leader misled by his generals and bullied by almost everyone in power. His trip to meet Bill Clinton is primarily face-saving. Still, the scene in the tent lends him a bit of humanity—something mostly denied to Pakistani characters by Indian filmmakers.
There’s enough scattered across Abhijeet Singh Parmar and Kushal Srivastava’s six-episode Netflix series to mark it out as an unusually level-headed piece of pre-Independence Day war propaganda. It’s not that Sharif (Vinay Pathak), General Pervez Musharraf (Manu Rishi Chaddha), Lt Gen Aziz Khan (Mohan Kapur) and Maj Gen Javed Hassan (Danish Hussain) aren’t presented as clear antagonists. Rather, what’s remarkable is the care with which the actors playing them go about their work, and the time and space allowed to them to flesh out their antagonists as entirely human.
As Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Sharif prepare to meet for historic peace talks in Lahore, the Indian Air Force’s Golden Arrows squadron are struggling to stay competitive in a war games simulation. Their commanding officer, B.S. ‘Tony’ Dhanoa (Jimmy Shergill), brings in a friend, Sqn Ldr Ajay Ahuja (Siddharth), to raise their game. Initially, nothing seems to gel. Jitendra ‘Sangy’ Sangwan (Taaruk Raina) transfers to the Mirage squad. R.S. ‘Dhali’ Dhaliwal (Abhay Verma) has prodigious flying abilities, but is a bit of a loose cannon. Bal ‘Baldy’ Reddy (Mihir Ahuja) is thrown for a loop after his fiancé, Madhavi (Prajakta Koli), turns up unannounced at the base. Ahuja cajoles, challenges, pushes their buttons, until they’re finally working as one (the bikes yoked together with string is so clearly there to set up a later scene that the show forgets to make it fun in itself). The first two episodes is a lot of patient scene-setting from writers Parmar, Sandeep Jain, Nikhil Ravi and Barun Kashyap—a little too patient.
The power games in Pakistan are more fascinating than the slow bonding of the Golden Arrows. Sharif is too pleased with his upcoming summit to realise that Musharraf is quietly engineering a war on the border. Instead of withdrawing his forces from the frozen heights of Kargil, as is the custom at the height of winter, Pakistani soldiers disguised as mujahideen take over these posts. The returning Indians forces come under fire, and the army brass immediately realise they’ve lost a crucial height advantage. Manu Rishi Chaddha is an uncannily effective Musharraf. The show does a tremendous job making him look like the general who’d later become Pakistan president, but it’s also a smart, contained performance from Chaddha. What would have been a caricature in most hands is instead played as a smart and calculating military strategist who for a long time has India playing catch up.
Things become more interesting over in India once the Golden Arrows find their urgent purpose in the war—to descend on the entrenched enemy from cloud cover and take photographs of their location and number. Netflix seem to have decided not to blow their budget on stars and instead funnel it into the aerial sequences. This pays off wonderfully: the flying is a lot more convincing and coherent than recent Bollywood war films. Director Oni Sen avoids overly flashy maneuvers that might expose the CGI, the impossible loops and missile-dodging of films like Fighter and Sky Force. In its place is simple, satisfying, propulsive flying.
Operation Safed Sagar doesn’t yell and beat its chest, but it nevertheless takes its propaganda duties seriously. All the jabs and accusations of other war films and series are repeated here, albeit less rabidly: Pakistan tortures POWs, we don’t; their soldiers fight for a salary, ours defend the nation; their commanding officers are uncaring, ours are mentors. There’s a momentum-arresting episode when an Indian pilot is shot down and is picked up in Pakistan; the subsequent interrogations are an exercise in bland heroism. Thankfully, the final stretch is exciting again, as Tony suggests a radical plan that’s worked out as a controlled experiment and executed as a series of beautifully rendered night bombings.
Even at six episodes, Operation Safed Sagar feels a bit leisurely. I’d have liked a tighter narrative, and a sharper one—there’s a little too much respect and politeness bouncing around that base. The odd stylistic flourish would’ve been welcome too; one bit of cleverness is when a photographer is clicking Musharraf and Sharif in the show and they’re neatly replaced by a still photo of the actual PM and army chief in the same spot. But this show is nevertheless a significant entry in the recent Indian war canon, for the way it shifts the focus onto strategy, processes and individual skill, and the way it’s immersed in the lives of these pilots. At one point when Madhavi is annoyed at Bal, Ahuja’s wife, Alka (Amrita Bagchi), tells her not to burden him before a sortie; she suggests writing her irritations in a diary and bringing them up once he’s done. It’s little touches like these that make the series feel true to the military experience. Of all the war filmmaking that’s come after Lakshya, this is its truest successor.
‘Operation Safed Sagar’ is on Netflix.
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