Dhurandhar: Dial D for Modi

DHURANDHAR: THE REVENGE is more overtly political than its predeces­sor in its direct references to current politics as also in its disregard for criticism that it not only chooses a side but promotes a polarisa­tion intrinsic to the Bharatiya Janata Par­ty (BJP)-Hindutva playbook. In awarding predictably poor grades to the film, most mainstream film critics carefully dressed their reviews as cinematic appraisals after a tidal wave of popular approval brushed aside moralistic finger-wagging and elite condescension in the case of Dhurandhar (the first one). In its emphatic thumbs-up to the films, the viewing public validated theDhurandhar narrative that presents Narendra Modi as a contrast to the vote-bank politics that shackled India’s fight against terrorism.

In a telling episode in the film, Paki­stani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Major Iqbal’s abusive, wheelchair-bound father, played with loathsome conviction by actor Suvinder Pal, explodes with rage when he sees Modi being sworn in as India’s prime minister on television. Consumed by his anger, the retired brigadier boasts of how he had raped dozens of Bangladeshi wom­en in the 1971 war and how his inept son had “allowed” Modi to win. “You pumped American dollars into NGOs in India and you had said your people would win this time, didn’t you?” he yells. The imputation is clear enough, that Modi’s opponents were the ISI’s preferred option. The retired brigadier forgets his generation lost the 1971 war and he continues to berate his son, essayed by Arjun Rampal, who listens with a rising sense of anger and menace.

BJP’s decision to name Modi as its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha election was viewed with alarm in many quarters in Pakistan. The reasons lay not only in the selective ac­counts of the 2002 Gujarat riots consumed in Pakistan but also in the assessment that Modi might prove a different kettle of fish as compared to the Manmohan Singh gov­ernment. As it happened, Modi began by trying what all his predecessors, includ­ing Atal Bihar Vajpayee did—reach out to Pakistan with a peace mission. Setting aside conventional calculations, Modi attended the wedding of then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s grand­daughter in Lahore on December 25, 2015 on his way back from Afghanistan. There is reason to believe that Sharif did see the benefits of better relations by way of peaceful borders and trade. The Paki­stani military establishment in Rawal­pindi felt otherwise and a terrorist attack on the Pathankot Indian Air Force (IAF) base in January 2016 was followed by a strike on an Indian Army camp at Uri in September. It was the Pakistani military’s way of testing Modi.

The prime minister responded by reworking India’s anti-terror doctrine, doing away with self-imposed restraints. For decades, options for responding to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism appeared to swing between ineffective measures such as suspension of diplomatic contacts and outright war and nothing much in between. The surgical strikes of Septem­ber 28-29, 2016, the bombing of a Jaish-e- Mohammed training camp at Balakot on February 26, 2019, and the May 7-10, 2025 Operation Sindoor marked a rising arc of retaliation that borrowed a page or two from Nobel-winning economist and for­eign policy scholar Thomas Schelling’s “theory of compellence” that advocates proactive deterrence. Modi shed previous hesitation over using military force as it was apparent that the Pakistan army’s animosity towards India was unchanged. “The Pakistani army remains obsessed with India. It has been obsessed with In­dia since Partition. It has lost every war with India and (after) losing every war it has come back even more obsessed. It sees no way of defeating India conven­tionally… it is building nuclear weapons and secondly what they euphemistically refer to as ‘asymmetric warfare’, a fancy term for supporting terrorists,” former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official Bruce Riedel said at a Brookings Institute event in 2013. He should know as he had a ringside view of US-India discussions after India’s 1998 nuclear test and is an authority on Pakistan’s jihadist groups.

Most audiences who watched the Dhurandhar films may not be fully schooled in the Pakistan army’s ways, but they instinctively understand the religious and ideologically laced venom in Brigadier Jahangir’s character. They understand that the hatred for India depicted in the films is not an extreme opinion but one shared by a large section of Pakistani elites besides radical clerics. The articulation may be crude and direct or more diffuse but it can be traced to the Muslim League’s 1940 La­hore Resolution demanding a sovereign state for Muslims and even earlier. The violence of Direct Action Day unleashed by Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in August 1946 and the plight of Hindus in Noakhali a few months later were a precur­sor to the communal riots that accompa­nied Partition. It is no surprise that more than seven decades later India and Pakistan are very different countries. But in the case of Pakistan, the radicalisation of its society was a tale foretold. The Manmohan Singh government’s inability to hit back after the 26/11 assault on Mumbai, the growing despair and anger over corruption, an un­abashed pursuit of appeasement politics and persistent double-digit inflation pow­ered Modi’s rise on the national scene. But once in office Modi did not rely on the nega­tives of the previous regime. Apart from a preparedness to use military muscle, he cleansed defence procurement of graft. He worked to provide basics such as cooking gas, healthcare, electricity and water to the needy and made strategic autonomy the centrepiece of India’s foreign policy.

Dhuradhar: The Revenge offers a strong defence of demonetisation or note bandi that was announced by Modi on Novem­ber 8, 2016. The decision to scrap ₹1,000 and ₹500 notes has been criticised on grounds that it failed to extinguish black money since 99 per cent of demonetised cur­rency was deposited in banks. Estimates that many with black money might not return their stash had to be revised, but it is also the case that much of the cash de­posited was unaccounted and had to be declared and assessed. The actual cash in circulation may have been much more than the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) re­cords indicated due to widespread disper­sal of fake currency. The film brings this out through its depiction of a gangster-politician in league with the ISI and in Paki­stan’s access to printing plates that allowed it to churn out hundreds of crores of fake Indian currency. The on-screen death of the ISI’s fake-currency man, banker Javed Khanani, not long after demonetisation, closely follows actual events. The disrup­tion of the fake currency-terrorism nexus was a real consequence of demonetisation. The fake money had made gangsters and politicians rich as the cash was used to purchase assets and fund arms and drug supplies. The murky world of terror and espionage is never still and it can be no­body’s case that fake currency has been eliminated. But there was a time when it was almost impossible to distinguish the real from the fake.

In making their political preference evident, the Dhurandhar films do not be­come less credible. Efforts to tar them as “propaganda” reveals an inability to come up with more convincing arguments. Seen in a certain way, films as different as Saving Private Ryan and Zero Dark Thirty— separated by time and context—can also be seen as propaganda. A dialogue from Zero Dark Thirty refers to Barack Obama as a “thoughtful, analytical guy” and the Tom Hanks classic can be seen as exalta­tion of the Allied cause. That doesn’t make these films propaganda.

Only a mulish denial of Modi’s ability to take risks and his ability to drive big so­cial and political projects can sustain the view that nothing good has happened since May 2014. Every policy decision can indeed be subject to analysis and the test of time but jaundiced commentary becomes a stuck record over time. The success of the Dhurandhar films is more evidence of the mainstreaming of what was seen as a fringe view easily confined by labels such as ‘Hindu nationalist’, ‘Hindutva’, and ‘righ­twing’. There was a time when cultural and political sensibilities were curated by an ex­clusive cabal and stepping out of line was as good as inviting permanent externment. This ecosystem is still a force to reckon with, enjoying disproportionate influence in civil society. But the reception accorded to the Dhurandhar films and the ready ac­ceptance of its political values is proof of a transformation in India’s mass psyche