At the core of India’s current situation is a striking discrepancy: the country’s most commercially successful film franchise is devoted to the notion of Indian omnipotence, while its actual foreign policy lies in the rubble of a conflict that it was unable to resolve diplomatically. Dhurandhar, the two parts of the Aditya Dhar-directed film series, which starred Ranveer Singh and were released in December 2025 and March 2026, have become India’s highest-grossing Hindi film series ever. With the unmistakable grammar of state-sponsored mythology, heroic sacrifice, evil neighbours, and a narrative arc in which India triumphs every time. It tells the story of an Indian intelligence agent dispatched to Karachi to destroy a network of gangsters and terrorists. That plot has more than just a cinematic issue. The actual world was telling a completely different story during the same months that the movie was setting box office records, and neither version of India’s favoured story was being heard by the rest of the world.

There was no political void when the Dhurandhar franchise first appeared. It is the latest and most commercially potent instalment in a decade-long trend of what critics have called muscular nationalist cinema that has flourished under the BJP government since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. The prime minister himself was clearly enthusiastic about movies like Uri: The Surgical Strike, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Article 370, all of which were box office successes with overtly political themes. It is no longer possible to write off the trend as coincidental. Modi directly praised Dhar’s Article 370. His Uri turned into a nationalist catchphrase. And Dhurandhar, which debuted just months after India’s worst military conflict with Pakistan in 20 years, portrays a fictional intelligence chief who is strikingly similar to Modi’s real National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, right down to his involvement in the 1999 hijacking crisis. The political purpose of the movie is not subtext, as stated by Indian opposition leader Akhilesh Yadav, who described the sequel as “a paid propaganda” intended to support the ruling party prior to state elections.

It is important to look closely at what the movie does to Pakistan because its complexity is more destructive than its simple depiction. Karachi is portrayed as a city that seems incapable of having a single modern structure or a moment of everyday life, a place of continual bomb blasts, criminal dens, and disintegrated state authority. Indian film critic Mayank Shekhar said that the movie was “performed, written, directed by those who haven’t ever stepped foot in Karachi and perhaps never will,” comparing it to how Hollywood depicts the brown world in post-apocalyptic sepia tones when it needs a setting for its protagonists. In a video titled “The Karachi you see in Dhurandhar vs the Karachi I saw last week,” journalist Haroon Rashid of the BBC Asian Network expressed the same idea more viscerally by juxtaposing the dystopian setting of the movie with the city’s music, food vendors, and the lived texture of its districts. This is intentional dehumanisation, not artistic license, and it has serious........

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