Opinion | Selective Outrage: When The West Applauds Its Myths But Judges India’s

Why suggest that when Western filmmakers rewrote the narrative on Vietnam it was catharsis but when Indian filmmakers take a leaf out of the same narrative book it is propaganda?

Does anyone remember a film called Missing in Action? It erupted in American theatres in 1984 starring that “one-man army", Chuck Norris.

The film was gratuitously violent, narcissistic, pure “Reagan-era revisionism" attempting to recast the lost cause of Vietnam as a rescue mission instead of a misguided, unwinnable war. Norris won instant acclaim.

Opinion | The Unsung Patriots Of Kashmir: A Story of Sacrifice, Success & Subsequent Betrayal

Opinion | End Of Naxalism: How Amit Shah Dismantled China’s Ideological Export

Opinion | 'Inside The Manosphere' Exposes Online Empire Of Misogyny, But Dodges The Causes

Akhil Vaani | Jewar: From A Wheat Field In UP To One Of Asia's Most Ambitious Airport Projects

And in those years, he was one of several of Hollywood’s preposterously jacked big guns, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, helping the US audiences, arguably middle-aged white men like Donald Trump, live out the ultimate fantasy: America winning any and every war it had lost during the Cold War, led by a presidential equivalent of a Sylvester “Testo"-Stallone.

Western film aficionados may not have been fans, but they made peace with the over-the-top innuendo. Few lamented the tawdry patriotism or the barely disguised advocacy of a neo-con worldview that was becoming fashionable among the “ayatollahs of the Potomac." These films were received with aplomb at the box office and catapulted both the oeuvre to near-classic status and their stars to cult-like reverence.

But even as Hollywood’s action men were delivering tinsel victories to Americans, in India, filmgoers sat anxiously in squeaking rexine-clad seats in ramshackle theatres, wary of the next bomb timed to the bloodlust of Pakistan-backed proxy groups. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, cinema halls and crowded public spaces were repeatedly targeted; in 1997 alone, a series of blasts across Jammu and Kashmir struck markets, buses, and theatres, underlining how everyday life itself had become a frontline.

Pakistan, under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, had adopted a strategy widely described as “bleeding India through a thousand cuts," weaponising non-state actors. India did respond at various points, covertly, diplomatically, and through sustained counter-insurgency operations, but for long stretches there was little that was visibly punitive or publicly demonstrative.

Even in moments of profound national trauma, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when 10 Pakistan-based terrorists held the city hostage for nearly 60 hours, killing 166 people, the response that followed was seen by many as effetely tentative and rooted in stiff diplomatese rather than overt military retaliation or other punitive measures like trade sanctions. Then, the public mood often demanded blood for blood. What it frequently got instead was dialogue or worse, “Aman ki Asha", a treacly form of engagement that critics very often dismissed as sugar-coated diplomacy.

A more visibly muscular doctrine emerged a few years later under Narendra Modi. Within a few years of assuming the Prime Ministership, Modi’s resolve was tested by Pakistan. And Modi walked the talk by contemplating retaliatory actions such as the Uri surgical strikes and the Balakot airstrikes.

With them, he signalled a shift toward overt retaliation. In that sense, India arguably found its own Reagan-esque moment, where assertion replaced ambiguity, and response became part of public signalling. Operation Sindoor was the highest point of that punitive arc on which Modi has built his reputation of a strongman.

Films like Uri and Dhurandhar are, in many ways, metastasising that myth, selling Indians a version of what decisive retaliation could look like, or might have looked like earlier. But that is not fundamentally different from what Hollywood did in the 1980s, crafting cinematic victories to compensate for frustration with strategists in the executive or military.

So, why has the Economist been so selective in pronouncing its judgement? Why suggest that when Western filmmakers rewrote the narrative on Vietnam it was catharsis but when Indian filmmakers take a leaf out of the same narrative book it is propaganda?

Indeed, the Economist titled its critique thus: Is Bollywood’s latest megahit propaganda for Narendra Modi? The question is simple: Is the magazine being “economical" with historical perspective when presenting its case against Dhurandhar?

© News18