There is no moral ambiguity surrounding the Kandahar Hijack of 1999 or the 26/11 Mumbai Terror Attacks. These were acts of brutal, indefensible carnage. Innocents were slaughtered, families were shattered. The ethical position is absolute and uncontested, remembering these atrocities is not merely a choice, but a solemn obligation. Yet, remembrance never exists in a vacuum of power. When collective memory is curated through the lens of cinema, it is transformed into a potent political instrument. The critical inquiry, therefore, is not whether terror ought to be remembered, but how it is reconstructed, and who is forced to bear the crushing burden of that memory.
Dhurandhar (2025), directed by Aditya Dhar, masquerades as a patriotic spy thriller anchored in national trauma. In reality, it executes a far more consequential maneuver, it transmutes raw trauma into a durable social logic. Here, violence is not treated as a historical rupture requiring geopolitical understanding or institutional accountability, instead, it is weaponised as evidence of an eternal civilisational threat. The film does not merely narrate an act of terror, it systematically subsidises a culture of suspicion.
This is the hallmark of twenty-first century propaganda, it no longer needs to shout its ideology, it simply stabilises it until it feels like gravity.
Trauma as Moral Monopoly
The film’s narrative authority is built upon the perceived sanctity of national pain. Events like Kandahar and 26/11 are deployed not as catalysts for ethical reflection, but as moral “trump cards.” Once dealt, they effectively foreclose all intellectual debate. Any interrogation of the film’s representational politics is framed as a sacrilegious affront to the victims, insulating the script from critical scrutiny. In this cinematic space, grief is transformed into a shield against accountability.
What evaporates in this process is the responsibility of the storyteller, the duty to distinguish specific perpetrators from entire populations. The film ignores the necessity of examining intelligence lapses or the complex geopolitical choices that germinate violence. Such questions would introduce “instability” into a narrative that demands absolute moral certainty. Dhurandhar refuses that complexity. As The Hollywood Reporter India observed, the film advances a “single-minded worldview,” prioritizing emotional catharsis over moral nuance. This assurance is not accidental, it is a form of ideological discipline.
Representation as Power
Stuart Hall’s seminal theory of representation is essential here. Hall posited that meaning is not birthed by isolated images, but by systems of representation that solidify associations through relentless repetition. The issue is not the presence of a singular “villain,” but rather which specific identities are consistently positioned as the locus of threat.
Dhurandhar constructs a hermetically sealed representational loop. Muslim-coded bodies occupy the geography of danger with surgical consistency. Islamic phrases are sonically weaponised, cultural markers are viewed through a lens of inherent menace. This is most evident in the film’s sound design, where religious slogans are layered over moments of impending violence to trigger an instinctive fear response. No single scene is the culprit, the power lies in the steady, cumulative drip of association. Over time, these links harden into what Hall termed “common sense.” The audience stops asking why the threat looks the way it does, the suspicion becomes an automated reflex. This is not realism, it is symbolic engineering designed to manufacture prejudice.
Orientalism Without Empire
Edward Said’s Orientalism is often misunderstood as a critique confined to Western imperialism. Its more profound argument is structural, power produces “knowledge” about the “Other” to justify its own dominance. In postcolonial societies, this logic does not vanish, it mutates. Dhurandhar reproduces an “Internal Orientalism” where Muslim characters are stripped of political context and moral interiority.
Violence is rendered as a cultural trait rather than a historical event, faith is depicted as destiny. Islam functions as a catch-all explanation for terror, the exact reductionism Said warned against. Al Jazeera’s analysis correctly situates this within a regional crisis, noting how the film collapses complex geopolitical friction into binary civilisational clashes. When violence is culturalised, it becomes unsolvable. You cannot negotiate with a culture, you can only seek to discipline or contain it.
Hegemony and Affect
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony illuminates why Dhurandhar is so viscerally effective. Hegemony is maintained not through brute force, but through “consent,” produced by cultural artifacts that make specific power structures appear natural and patriotic. The film does not have to explicitly state that an entire community is a threat, it makes the viewer feel that they are. Through music cues, pacing, and cinematography, the viewer’s heartbeat is synchronized with the state’s apparatus. In this heightened state of “affect,” doubt feels like betrayal and nuance feels like a security risk.
The Indian Express aptly described the film as a “rage-driven spectacle” designed to provoke alignment rather than reflection. As Gramsci warned, hegemony is most successful when ideology disappears into the fabric of “common sense.”
Epistemic Injustice and Forced Loyalty
Miranda Fricker’s theory of “epistemic injustice” reveals the film’s most lasting damage. When an identity is tethered to violence, its members suffer “testimonial injustice.” Their condemnations of terror are dismissed as “insufficient” or “taqiya,” and their critiques of representation are labeled as biased.
Simultaneously, “hermeneutical injustice” takes root. The marginalized community is deprived of the shared social language needed to explain the psychological toll of living under permanent suspicion without being accused of defensiveness. This creates a state of “probationary citizenship,” where loyalty must be performed perpetually. Silence is suspicious, speech is seen as strategic. This is the calculated social afterlife of the propaganda film.
The Global Mirror: What the Press Reveals
The reception of the film across international newsrooms exposes how ideology circulates. Al Jazeera framed the film as a sociopolitical hazard for India’s Muslim citizens. Deccan Herald and The National (UAE) reported on the film’s ban in several Gulf nations, citing its divisive narrative and diplomatic insensitivity toward the portrayal of Pakistan.
Conversely, domestic outlets like The Times of India focused on the “spectacle” and “scale,” while The Economic Times viewed the controversy through the cold lens of “political economy,” noting how the international backlash hampered global profits. This divergence is telling, what is sold as “patriotic entertainment” at home is recognized as “ideological aggression” abroad.
Erasure as Narrative Strategy
The most significant aspect of Dhurandhar is what it chooses to omit. It erases the Muslim victims of terror. It erases the Muslims who have stood against extremism as officers, soldiers, and scholars. It erases the centuries of Islamic ethical tradition that strictly forbid the harming of non-combatants.
Erasure is a form of narrative discipline. By narrowing the moral field, the film creates a world where suspicion is always rational and innocence is always conditional.
Beyond the Credits
To condemn the horrors of Kandahar and 26/11 does not, and must not, require the acceptance of collective guilt. To honor victims does not require the permanent surveillance of a community. Cinema that converts trauma into identity-based fear does not fortify national security, it corrodes the very foundation of democratic ethics. The most effective propaganda does not rely on the “big lie.” Instead, it organizes human feeling, stabilizes dormant suspicions, and repeats partial truths until they feel whole.
An ethical cinema would do the opposite, it would expand the moral imagination, interrogate power alongside violence, and refuse the cheap convenience of civilisational shortcuts. Dhurandhar chooses the path of contraction. Long after the screen goes dark, the viewer is left not with a deeper understanding of history, but with a recalibrated instinct, whom to fear, whom to exclude, and who must spend their lives explaining themselves.
That is the true, enduring politics of the film.
