With Dhurandhar’s second installment, it’s as if director Aditya Dhar wants to prove his critics right, not wrong. There was a huge backlash with the first volume against several critics who called it propaganda. Now even die-hard fans find it difficult to deny that the sequel is propaganda because the political message is no longer subtle.
This propaganda is not in favor of the state, like many Hollywood movies, but in favor of the ruling party, thus collapsing the state and the party together. However, the label “propaganda” is hardly new in Bollywood’s climate filled with propaganda productions. In a more critical political reading, films like Dhurandhar enable the creation of a new kind of Indian citizen in which nationalism, narrowly defined, is the only virtue and is also inextricably linked to violence. This has serious implications for culture and democracy.
When the main antagonist, the barbaric ISI figure Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), who wants to commit unspeakable horrors on Indians, his father says, “You said your people would win again this time, didn’t you?” Against the backdrop of a visual of Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 swearing-in, the film emphatically labels the main opposition in the world’s largest democracy, the Congress party, as an ally of the Pakistani state that supports terror.
Rewriting history
By portraying demonetisation as a masterstroke against Pakistan’s production of Indian fake currency, the film seeks to rewrite history. After all, demonetisation has resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people, has not eradicated terrorism or black money (99.3% of circulation has been returned to banks), devastated a huge informal sector and brought India’s GDP growth rate down from 8.3% (2016) to 3.9% (2019). For the film, which is praised for depicting real events, many terrorists and gangsters were killed, contrary to the depiction, before 2014.
As history is shamelessly rewritten for explicitly militaristic-nationalistic purposes, the film ends with the actual army motto “Balidan Param Dharm”. Here, every male citizen is encouraged to exercise what sociologist Klaus Theweleit – who has studied male fantasies and Nazism – would call “military masculinity”.
After all, the film is shameless when the lead character Ajay Sanyal (R. Madhavan plays Ajit Doval) tells the protagonist Jaskirat/Hamza (Ranveer Singh): We are men… we are meant to fight. For our cause. For our dreams. For our rights. For our family.” Unsurprisingly, the main female lead, Yalina (Sara Arjun), gets about 15 minutes of screen time in the four-hour film as her husband sets out to exact revenge for all the nation’s wounds.
“If the ‘Angry Young Man’ trope of 1970s Hindi cinema is the rebellious anti-hero who opposes the poverty and inequality of the establishment and stands firmly on the side of the poor, today’s angry young man is the hero of the establishment, especially the popcorn-munching classes.”
Reducing nationalism to performative violence
Being a real soldier and a metaphorical soldier for the nation are intertwined. Jaskirat, a young man whose father and grandfather were in the army, wanted to join the army himself. But his dreams are shattered when his father and sister are killed and another sister is kidnapped. Faced with a failed government (appropriately in Punjab) that protects politically influential thugs and murderers, Jaskirat is “forced” to kill 12 criminals and find his sister.
But if the visible face of the state gives him the death penalty, the invisible face of the state saves him from death row and makes him a soldier of the nation. The anger against those who destroyed his family and the government that failed to protect him is now directed at the external enemy state – or internal enemies who are helping the external enemy. As Jaskirat declares – after several years as Hamza’s spy in Pakistan – he has abandoned his desire to return to his family because his only obsession is to complete the task of eliminating the nation’s enemies.
This is the sorcery that Dhurandhar performs: the curtailment of nationalism from the goals of the Constitution to create a democratic republic that ensures justice, liberty, equality and fraternity for all, to one that is only about protecting the nation from enemies through performative violence. Every other socio-economic goal is meaningless.
“Internal” enemies
While the external enemy is crystal clear, the internal enemies who help the external enemy are also the usual suspects: Khalistani, Naxalites, Kashmiri militants, Kerala Popular Front, Uttar Pradesh slaughterhouses, NGOs, socialists and universities. Here, even legitimate democratic dissidents are labeled as allies of terror. While the film casts UP-don Atiq Ahmad as the main pillar of Pakistan’s terror network and shows Dawood Ibrahim saying that there is fear in “our people” since the chaiwala came, it fails to mention that Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who was once accused under terror laws of harboring terrorists from the Dawood 204 gang (MP204 ruling terrorists).
Violence here becomes the sine qua non of nationalist justice. If the “Angry Young Man” trope of 1970s Hindi cinema is the rebellious anti-hero who opposes the poverty and inequality of the establishment and stands firmly on the side of the poor, today’s angry young man is the hero of the establishment, especially the popcorn-eating classes. They vicariously enjoy the violent nationalist justice he delivers, which includes forcing a terrorist who called Hindus cowards to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” when he is killed.
The film doesn’t just depict gruesome violence; he revels in it as grand entertainment alongside pulsating music, music that makes liberal use of English hip-hop. The violence assumes what cultural critic Henry Giroux calls a “glamorous and fascist edge”. Viewers’ comments indicating that Jaskirat’s brutal murders of his family’s killers were among the most popular parts of the film show how films build common sense on vigilante justice, when the police meet the murders, it has broad legitimacy.
Unmentioned violence
As much as a reductionist form of nationalism is invoked, the film communicates that only a certain form of violence should actually provoke the anger of citizens: terrorist violence. As director Rajamouli said while commenting on Madhavan’s role, “You carried the helplessness and frustration of the nation so well.” All other forms of everyday violence (including structural violence), forms of huge inequalities (the top 1% of Indians earn more now than they did in the last year of the British Raj), over a million lives lost annually to air pollution, hundreds of thousands of people who died due to the COVID-19 pandemic due to inadequate health care, those who were lynched in the name of religion, infected with new violence and children who died of coughs have become uncorrupted by force. nationalist cinematic imagination.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that the roots of totalitarianism lie in thoughtlessness and a lack of critical thinking. India, a nation of 1.5 billion people, is a treasure trove of human stories. Yet Dhurandhar’s New India demands a monochromaticization of our imagination. Its tsunami success heralds the unfortunate closure of the Indian mind.
Published – 24 March 2026 10:54 IST
