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Dhurandhar 2 offers a grand justification for demonetisation that even BJP couldn’t dream of

Dhurandhar 2 is an audacious retcon. The nation is the collateral.

An early scene in Dhurandhar: The Revenge presages a kind of revisionism present throughout the film.

The Intelligence Bureau chief Ajay Sanyal, played by R Madhavan, attempts to enlist a broken Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a death-row convict who has been handpicked and spirited out of jail. Jaskirat only wants the release of an anonymous death, but Sanyal counters that sentiment with a rousing Sikh prayer. “Sura so pehchaniye, jo lade deen ke het / Purja purja kat mare, kabhoo na chhade khet,” Sanyal exhorts. Loosely translated, the lines mean that a true spiritual warrior is one who fights for the rights of the oppressed and does not abandon the battlefield, even when his body is demolished part by part.

It’s a beautiful, stirring call to courage that several TV shows and films have deployed, but perhaps its best use is in the National Award-winning Tamas (1988). Govind Nihalani’s devastating film, also set in Pakistan but during India’s Partition, lies on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Dhurandhar. If a congregation chants “jo lade deen ke het” right before plunging to their deaths in Tamas, Dhurandhar uses it to justify the murderous rampage it’s about to embark on.

And just like that, a prayer, shorn of its original context and meaning to hold your ground in times of adversity, is conscripted in the service of propaganda.

Dhurandhar repeats this exercise with its soundtrack, setting a wide-ranging playlist of bangers from the ’80s and ’90s as no-context background music for high-speed chases, suicide missions, and newer, more depraved ways of stripping bodies for parts. But it does it most sloppily to rehabilitate one of the most painful eras in India’s economic life: Demonetisation.

In Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the 2016 demonetisation is rebranded Operation Green Leaf. In the film’s telling, Pakistani intelligence and underworld operatives—including a fictionalised Dawood Ibrahim—have funnelled Rs 60,000 crore in counterfeit notes into India, specifically to buy the Uttar Pradesh elections. The Prime Minister’s televised address from 8 November 2016 is lifted wholesale and inserted into the film. This masterstroke, the film proposes, was merely the public face of a covert military strike.

It is an audacious retcon. But........

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