Mumbai: Janhvi Kapoor’s ‘Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl’ has been surrounded with controversies ever since its release on August 12.
According to a report by Hindustan Times, retired Wing Commander IK Khanna, the instructor who trained the first batch of IAF female pilots, has now slammed the film for its misleading facts.
In the opinion column of The Print, Khanna wrote that several facts shown in the movie are inaccurate as under his watch, all the women pilots were treated as equals.
“I was one of the instructors back in July 1994 when the first batch of seven women pilots arrived at the Air Force Station at Yelahanka, Bengaluru, to commence training on IAF transport aircraft,” wrote the instructor.
“Gender bias has been part of Indian society for ages, but women have been part of the defence services in many fields for years. And to believe that Gunjan Saxena, or for that matter any other woman pilot, was subjected to arm wrestling—as the film on her shows!” expressed Khanna.
“No one had to run to their room to change as shown in Gunjan Saxena,” he added.
Narrating the story of Harita Kaur Deol (later Flying Officer Harita Deol), Khanna stated that she had performed the operation of shutting down an engine and restarting it in air, just like the one Janhvi performed in the film.
“As Harita went through the paces with a demonstration of the exercise by the instructor followed by practice by her, I could see the journalist sweating more than Harita,” wrote Khanna.
Soon after the release of ‘Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl’, several veterans of the IAF slammed the film for a negative portrayal of the Indian Air Force.
Sreevidya Rajan, one of Gunjan’s fellow officers, claimed that she was the first female pilot who was sent to Kargil, and not Gunjan, as the film claims.
“In the movie, Gunjan Saxena was shown as the only lady pilot to fly in Kargil operations. This is factually incorrect. We were posted together to Udhampur and when the Kargil conflict started, I was the first woman pilot to be sent along with the male counterparts in the first detachment of our unit which deployed at Srinagar,” Sreevidya had claimed in her Facebook post.
Reacting to Sreevidya’s claim, Gunjan told NDTV, “From July 1999 till today, my name has featured in a number of headlines, in a number of articles, and in the Limca Book of Records, and in one of the promotion exams taken by the Air Force. Between July 1999 and today, I don’t see what has changed. The only thing that has changed is this movie being released.”
