The Mob Comes For Film Critics

If the goal is to serve nationalistic propaganda to the masses, there is hardly a better medium than a slickly produced, multi-starrer, action-packed spy thriller that straddles fact and fiction, and uses one to bolster the other. The cloak-and-dagger world of spies presents fertile ground for creating national heroes and national enemies. Also, when nationalism is the defining quality of a film, raising questions about it can be made to look like treason. Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar released in early December last year. The nature of online public discourse—if we must call it that—surrounding the film is familiar to anyone who has been on India’s corner of the internet in the past decade. Where trolls earlier descended on academics, activists and journalists, today they have zeroed in on film critics.

Dhurandhar is set during the bloody 2000s in the gangster town of Lyari, a dense settlement in Pakistan’s Karachi, which was then under the grip of warring Baloch and Pashtun crime lords. Ranveer Singh plays Hamza Ali Mazari, a gorilla-build Indian spy who infiltrates the gang of Rehman Baloch, played to great effect and virality by Akshaye Khanna—whose hairline and career appear to be making a comeback. Sanjay Dutt features as Baloch’s rival and a rogue cop, and Arjun Rampal as the chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The Pakistani characters are especially prone to psychopathic violence. Though much of the film is focussed on gang rivalry and the tussle for political control over Lyari—which is said to hold the key to Karachi and, by extension, Pakistan—the gangs are also shown to be connected to crimes across the border, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks and a fake-currency network.

Box-office figures and packed theatre halls have confirmed that the spy thriller, touted to be inspired by real events, is a runaway hit. Since the day of its release, social-media platforms have been overflowing with edits of Khanna’s flamboyant entrance sequence and of Singh flipping his hair, set to the film’s viral soundtrack. Even reviewers who called it evidently nationalistic appreciated its gripping storyline or gritty action scenes.

Dhar is fond of spy and military universes where lookalikes of the national security advisor Ajit Doval—who has the run of the intelligence establishment under Narendra Modi—mastermind operations that teach Pakistan a lesson. Uri: The Surgical Strike, Dhar’s first directorial venture, featured veteran actor Paresh Rawal as an intelligence chief who comes up with the idea of the strike as a response to a 2016 attack on an Indian military base in a town called Uri, in Jammu and Kashmir. Dhurandhar has Ajay Sanyal, played by R Madhavan. Dhar splices together real footage of the 2001 Parliament attack and the Kandahar plane hijack—Doval was one of the top negotiators in the operation—to fortify this connection. In the first scene of the film, one of the hijackers taunts Sanyal: “Hindus are a cowardly community, aren’t they?” Fuelled by such taunts and his frustration at the ideological weakness of the government he is serving, Sanyal launches the titular operation, aimed at infiltrating Pakistan’s terror networks. At one point, when Sanyal learns that Pakistan is producing fake Indian currency, he keeps the information to himself, deciding to wait for a leader who “cares more” about India to come to power.