Watching Dhurandhar: The Revenge, one quickly realises that the film has little interest in uncertainty. It does not ask difficult questions about terrorism, justice or national security. It offers certainty. Heroes are unquestionably virtuous. Enemies are instantly recognisable. Ambiguity disappears beneath spectacle.
That is precisely what makes the film politically significant.
Its politics do not lie in explicit speeches or ideological declarations. They lie in the associations it patiently constructs. Muslim identity repeatedly appears alongside terrorism, Pakistan, drugs, blasphemy and anti-national conspiracies until these otherwise distinct ideas begin to feel inseparable. Individual characters matter less than the symbolic burden they are asked to carry. Identity itself becomes evidence.
Turning National Security into a Story of Suspicion
This is propaganda in its classical sense. As Harold Lasswell described, propaganda works by managing public attitudes through symbols. Dhurandhar: The Revenge rarely persuades through argument; it persuades through repetition. When the same associations appear often enough, suspicion begins to feel like common sense.
The emotional architecture of the film rests on revenge. Its recurring line, “Ghayal ho isiliye ghatak ho”, captures the moral universe it constructs. Injury becomes justification. Vengeance becomes virtue. Restraint is treated not as strength but as weakness.
Everything in the film reinforces this emotional logic. The dialogue is deliberately abrasive. Opponents are mocked rather than engaged. Violence is choreographed with soaring music, slow-motion imagery and triumphant framing that invites celebration rather than reflection. The consequences of violence matter less than its emotional satisfaction.
The portrayal of Muslims is especially revealing. A Muslim medical student is quickly drawn into the orbit of terrorism. Allegations of blasphemy function less as legal claims requiring evidence than as dramatic devices that deepen suspicion. Religious identity repeatedly overwhelms every other identity. Doctors, students and professionals cease to be individuals. They become representatives of a community that is expected to prove its loyalty before it can claim equal citizenship.
This extends beyond individual characters. Terrorism, organised crime, cross-border conflict, narcotics and extremist networks are folded into a single story about national insecurity. Complexity disappears beneath a familiar binary of patriots and traitors. Questions of due process, constitutional rights and institutional accountability barely survive within that framework.
Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan describe this process as securitisation, whereby groups are discursively constructed as security threats rather than as equal citizens. Once that shift occurs, extraordinary suspicion begins to appear reasonable. Citizenship is measured less by constitutional equality than by visible demonstrations of loyalty.
Cinema gives this process enormous emotional force. Patriotic music, heroic framing, carefully timed editing and stylised action do not merely entertain. They direct feeling. Viewers are encouraged to experience outrage, pride and vengeance long before they have an opportunity to reflect on the political assumptions beneath those emotions.
Institutions receive similarly selective treatment. Intelligence agencies appear either remarkably efficient or curiously powerless, depending on what the story requires. Investigations quickly give way to retaliation. Justice is imagined not as a process grounded in evidence but as immediate retribution. Constitutional safeguards become obstacles rather than democratic principles.
No single film creates prejudice. Public attitudes are shaped gradually through repetition across culture, politics and media. Yet films matter because they participate in that larger process. When similar narratives recur across popular cinema, they normalise particular ways of imagining the nation. Some communities become permanent objects of suspicion while others become the unquestioned custodians of patriotism.
Their influence does not end in cinemas. Patriotic speeches, revenge sequences and emotionally charged confrontations circulate widely across social media, detached from the larger narrative and repackaged as political messages. In an algorithm-driven public sphere, emotionally satisfying clips often travel much further than nuanced discussion.
The Cinematic Threat to the Democratic Imagination
There is nothing objectionable about making films on terrorism or national security. Some of India’s finest political cinema has explored precisely these themes. What distinguished those films was their willingness to embrace ambiguity. They recognised that democracies are untidy, institutions are imperfect, and citizenship cannot be reduced to a test of ideological loyalty.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge chooses certainty over complexity. That is its central weakness. The problem is not that it is political. Cinema has always been political. The problem is that it mistakes spectacle for truth and revenge for justice. By collapsing constitutional values into emotional retribution and reducing citizenship to suspicion, it narrows the democratic imagination instead of expanding it.
The stories a nation repeatedly tells about its minorities eventually become the stories it tells about itself. That is why films like Dhurandhar: The Revenge deserve serious scrutiny. Not because they take a political position, but because they shape the political language through which audiences come to understand fear, belonging and the nation itself.
