Every democracy that has fought a covert war has eventually confronted the same question about the entertainment it produces from that war: is this art or is this an instrument of state? The question consumed Israeli intellectuals after Operation Wrath of God produced a generation of revenge thrillers. It consumed Americans after Zero Dark Thirty turned the bin Laden raid into a two-hour argument about whether torture works. And it has consumed India since Dhurandhar turned the shadow war against terrorism into a Ranveer Singh vehicle that broke box office records and, according to its critics, broke something else: the line between patriotism and propaganda.

The debate over whether Dhurandhar is propaganda or patriotism has played out across newspaper op-ed pages, television panel discussions, social media threads, academic conferences, and parliamentary corridors. Film critics, political commentators, cultural theorists, retired intelligence officers, ruling party spokespersons, and opposition politicians have all weighed in with positions that tell us as much about their own political alignment as about the film itself. The intensity of the argument exceeds anything a Bollywood film has provoked since Deepa Mehta’s Fire triggered street protests in 1998, and the nationalism debate around Dhurandhar has arguably become more culturally significant than the film that generated it. What began as a question about one movie has become a referendum on what India wants to be: a country that processes state violence through celebration or a country that processes it through interrogation.

This article positions the debate not as a binary question with a correct answer but as an analytical spectrum with identifiable positions, testable evidence, and real consequences for democratic governance. The propaganda-vs-patriotism framing itself is reductive. The more productive question is what type of cultural work Dhurandhar performs, and whether that work serves or damages the democratic institutions that distinguish India from the states it fights.

The Film’s Version

Dhurandhar presents itself as entertainment, not as a political document. The complete analysis of the film reveals a three-act structure built on familiar cinematic grammar: a devastating attack establishes the moral premise, a covert mission generates the dramatic tension, and a successful elimination delivers the cathartic resolution. The film does not pause to lecture. It does not display text cards explaining India’s counter-terrorism doctrine. It does not feature a character who turns to the camera and argues that extrajudicial killing is justified under international law. The argument is embedded in structure, not stated in dialogue.

The structural argument works like this. Dhurandhar opens with a recreation of a terror attack that kills civilians, including women and children, in a public space. The scene establishes the moral asymmetry on which the entire film depends: the attackers are indiscriminate, the victims are innocent, and the state’s response will be precise. The operative played by Ranveer Singh does not harm civilians. He does not torture suspects. He does not violate any code that the audience would recognize as immoral. He kills the specific individuals responsible for the specific attack depicted in the first act, and the film rewards his precision with survival, professional vindication, and emotional reunification with his family. The narrative arc is a moral circle that closes cleanly: violence begets violence, but the second violence is righteous because it is targeted, controlled, and final.

The film’s own marketing never used the word propaganda. Press tours and promotional interviews positioned Dhurandhar as a thriller inspired by real events, a category that includes everything from Argo to The Social Network and carries no inherent political charge. The director spoke of creative independence, meticulous research, and a desire to tell a story that had never been told in Hindi cinema. Production notes emphasized the technical craft: location scouting, weapon consulting, dialect coaching, stunt choreography. The film positioned itself in the tradition of prestige action cinema, not agitprop.

Supporters of Dhurandhar adopted this framing enthusiastically. Trade analyst Komal Nahta pointed to commercial strategy rather than political alignment as the film’s driving logic, noting that filmmakers pursue audience appetite wherever it leads and that nationalist sentiment happened to be where the appetite led. Audiences who watched Dhurandhar and clapped during the elimination sequences understood themselves to be enjoying a well-crafted thriller, not enlisting in a political movement. The patriotism they felt was, from their perspective, organic: a natural emotional response to watching the bad guys lose.

The film’s defenders point to its awards as evidence of quality rather than political capture. Critical recognition from peer juries, they argue, suggests artistic merit independent of ideological function. A propaganda film, in this reading, is one that sacrifices craft for message. Dhurandhar, its defenders insist, sacrificed nothing, and whatever political resonance it generates is the byproduct of artistic excellence rather than its purpose.

This self-presentation is coherent but incomplete. What the film says about itself matters less than what it does to the audiences who watch it and the political environment those audiences inhabit. Understanding the gap between self-presentation and function requires examining the specific cinematic mechanisms through which the production constructs its political argument while maintaining the appearance of political neutrality.

Consider the specific mechanisms through which Dhurandhar constructs its moral argument without ever stating it explicitly. Every scene that could introduce moral ambiguity is resolved before the ambiguity can settle. When the operative receives orders to kill a target inside a foreign country without that country’s consent, the scene does not pause to consider sovereignty. When the operative tracks a target to a location where civilians are present, the scene does not linger on the risk of collateral harm. When the handler authorizes an operation that will, if exposed, constitute an act of war, the scene does not explore the diplomatic consequences. Each of these moments is a fork where the narrative could have turned toward complexity; at every fork, the narrative turns toward clarity. The clarity is the argument. By making every operational decision appear obviously correct, the narrative embeds the assumption that covert operations on foreign soil are obviously correct, and the audience absorbs the assumption through the story rather than evaluating it as a proposition.

Bollywood’s commercial machinery amplifies this structural persuasion through techniques that pre-date the nationalism debate entirely. Star casting is one such technique: by placing Ranveer Singh, an actor associated with charisma, romance, and audience goodwill, in the operative role, the casting decision transfers the audience’s pre-existing emotional relationship with the star onto the character’s actions. When Singh’s operative kills, the audience does not experience the killing as an abstract moral question. They experience it as something their favorite star did, and the emotional residue of fandom coats the action in approval that has nothing to do with counter-terrorism policy. This is standard commercial cinema practice, identical to how Tom Cruise’s star persona sanitizes the morally ambiguous operations depicted in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The practice is not propaganda. It is commerce. But the commercial effect and the propagandistic effect are identical.

Sound design performs a similar function. Dhurandhar’s soundtrack deploys the rising orchestral score during elimination sequences, a musical grammar that Hollywood established in war films during the 1940s and that audiences worldwide now read as “heroic action.” The audience does not consciously process the score as an argument. The score bypasses conscious processing entirely, producing an emotional state (exhilaration, satisfaction, relief) that the audience attributes to the narrative content rather than to the musical manipulation. Critics who identify this technique as propaganda are technically correct: the sound design performs the same persuasive function as a political speech set to music. Defenders who object to calling it propaganda are also correct: every action thriller in every country uses identical techniques, and applying the propaganda label selectively to Indian cinema while ignoring identical practices in Hollywood is a double standard.

Editing rhythm contributes a third layer of structural persuasion. The pace at which Dhurandhar cuts between shots during operational sequences is calibrated to prevent contemplation. Quick cuts maintain adrenaline, sustain suspense, and carry the viewer through morally ambiguous moments before the viewer can register the ambiguity. Slower editing would allow the audience to sit with what they are watching: a person being killed by another person outside any legal framework. The editing does not allow sitting. It carries. And carrying the audience past moral complexity is a directorial choice with political consequences, regardless of whether the director intended those consequences or simply pursued the standard grammar of action cinema.

The Reality

The reality of the Dhurandhar nationalism debate is significantly more complex than either the propaganda accusation or the entertainment defense allows. The debate has played out across three distinct spheres, each with its own stakeholders, its own evidence standards, and its own conclusions.

The first sphere is media criticism. Film critics who reviewed Dhurandhar split along predictable lines. Trade publications evaluated the film’s commercial performance and production values, finding both exceptional. The box office impact analysis documented record-breaking numbers that became their own argument: audiences had voted, and the vote was overwhelming. Cultural critics working for English-language publications applied different standards. They asked not whether the film was well-made but whether its well-made quality was precisely what made it dangerous. A poorly crafted propaganda film can be dismissed. A brilliantly crafted one cannot.

Raja Sen, writing for a major national publication, framed the question sharply: the film’s technical excellence is the point, not the defense. If Dhurandhar were a bad movie, it would not have normalized anything. Its success as cinema is what enables its success as ideology. Sen’s critique did not deny the film’s artistic merits. It argued that those merits are inseparable from the political work the film performs. A beautifully shot scene of a covert operative killing a terrorist in a foreign country makes extrajudicial killing look beautiful. The beauty is the argument.

Anupama Chopra, widely considered India’s most influential film critic, navigated both positions. She praised the film’s craft while noting that its moral simplicity was both its commercial strength and its analytical weakness. Dhurandhar does not ask questions. It answers them, and the answer is always the same: they hit us, we hit them back, and hitting back is heroic. Chopra noted that commercial cinema has never been obligated to be morally complex, but argued that when commercial cinema engages with real, ongoing covert operations, the obligation changes. Fiction about the past has interpretive distance. Fiction about the present has political consequences.

The second sphere is academic analysis. Political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy and one of India’s most prominent public intellectuals, has written extensively about the relationship between popular culture and democratic erosion. Mehta’s framework treats cultural products like Dhurandhar as indicators of democratic health. When a democracy produces entertainment that celebrates extrajudicial state violence without moral interrogation, Mehta argues, the entertainment is a symptom of a deeper condition: the public has already accepted the violence, and the film confirms rather than creates that acceptance. The film is not the cause but the thermometer.

Mehta’s analysis distinguishes between two types of cultural production. The first type challenges the audience: it presents state violence as morally costly, shows the perpetrators as damaged by what they do, and forces the viewer to sit with discomfort. Spielberg’s Munich is the canonical example. Avner Kaufman kills the men responsible for the Munich massacre, and the film ensures the audience knows the killing is corroding his soul. The second type comforts the audience: it presents state violence as clean, necessary, and consequence-free. Dhurandhar is the canonical Indian example. The operative kills the men responsible for the attack, and the film ensures the audience feels satisfaction rather than unease. Mehta’s argument is that the second type is more dangerous precisely because it is more commercially successful, and commercial success is a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Aarti Virani, a media studies scholar who has published extensively on how entertainment normalizes state violence in democratic societies, brought a comparative lens. Virani documented a pattern visible across multiple democracies: the period immediately following a major security crisis produces cultural products that celebrate aggressive state response, and these products enjoy commercial success that would have been impossible in peacetime. The pattern held for American cinema after September 11, Israeli cinema after the Second Intifada, and Indian cinema after Pulwama. The pattern suggests that Dhurandhar’s success is not evidence of state manipulation but evidence of something potentially more concerning: genuine popular demand for narratives that make state violence feel righteous.

The third sphere is political. The Indian government’s relationship with Dhurandhar has been the most scrutinized aspect of the debate. Several BJP-led state governments offered tax exemptions on cinema tickets for the film, lowering prices to encourage attendance. Tax exemptions for films are not unprecedented in India, and they have been offered across political lines for films deemed to have social value. The distinction critics drew was one of pattern: the films receiving tax exemptions in recent years have disproportionately aligned with the ruling party’s ideological positions. Uri: The Surgical Strike received similar treatment. The Kashmir Files received similar treatment. The accumulation of these individual decisions, each defensible in isolation, created a pattern that critics argued constituted soft state sponsorship of ideologically aligned cinema.

The National Film Award that Dhurandhar received added fuel to this argument. Awards juries are theoretically independent, but the appointment of jury members falls within government influence. Critics argued that the award functioned as an official endorsement, converting a commercial entertainment product into a government-recognized work of national importance. The award did not make Dhurandhar propaganda. But it blurred the boundary between state and entertainment in a way that made the propaganda accusation harder to dismiss.

Government officials did nothing to discourage the association. The Prime Minister’s office did not produce Dhurandhar, did not fund it, and did not direct its content. But senior government figures praised it publicly, screened it at official events, and, most significantly, adopted its vocabulary. When the phrase “ghar mein ghus ke maarta hai” migrated from the film’s dialogue to the Prime Minister’s rally speeches, the fusion of entertainment and political messaging became difficult to separate.

Pakistan’s response completed the circuit. As the Pakistan ban analysis documented, Islamabad treated Dhurandhar not as a movie but as a national security instrument. The ban itself became evidence for both sides of the Indian debate: critics said it proved the film was propaganda (even the adversary recognized it as such), while supporters said it proved the film was accurate (the adversary’s fury demonstrated its truth). The Pakistani response locked the debate into a frame where questioning Dhurandhar’s politics risked aligning the questioner with Pakistan’s position, a frame that has silenced many potential critics.

Beyond these three spheres, the debate has penetrated a fourth domain that receives less attention but may prove more consequential: the legal and strategic community. Retired intelligence officers, military analysts, and national security commentators have engaged with Dhurandhar not as a cultural artifact but as an operational security concern. Several retired senior officials have raised the question of whether the widespread association between real covert operations and a specific Bollywood production creates vulnerabilities for Indian intelligence. When every elimination in Pakistan is immediately labeled in cinematic terms by Indian media, the branding provides Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence with a ready-made attribution narrative. Pakistani officials can point to the cultural celebration as evidence of state orchestration without needing to produce intelligence evidence. The celebratory cultural environment around Dhurandhar may, paradoxically, complicate the very operations it celebrates by providing adversaries with a public attribution framework.

Strategic analysts have also noted the effect on deterrence signaling. When a nation’s covert operations are celebrated in popular culture, the signal sent to the adversary is ambiguous. On one hand, the celebration communicates capability and willingness, which enhances deterrence. On the other hand, the celebratory framing trivializes the operations, which may reduce their deterrent impact. A target who fears an unseen, unknown, unnamed threat may adjust behavior more than a target who sees the threat celebrated in song and dance. Dhurandhar has given the shadow war a face, a name, and a soundtrack, and the strategic community is divided on whether this visibility helps or hinders the campaign’s effectiveness.

Former diplomats have contributed a fifth dimension to the debate: the international reception question. India’s global image as a responsible democracy depends, in part, on maintaining credible deniability for covert operations. A cultural environment that openly celebrates those operations undermines the plausible deniability that diplomatic relationships require. When Indian ministers attend Dhurandhar screenings and adopt its dialogue, foreign governments receive a signal about official endorsement that cannot be easily retracted. The diplomatic cost of cultural celebration is rarely quantified but is acknowledged within the foreign policy establishment as a real concern.

Audiences themselves, the millions of viewers whose collective response gave the blockbuster its cultural power, have participated in the debate less through formal argumentation and more through consumer behavior. Box office returns, social media engagement, merchandise purchases, and the adoption of its dialogue as ringtones and social media captions constitute a form of plebiscitary endorsement that bypasses the editorial and academic structures of formal debate. Audience behavior does not argue for or against the propaganda characterization; it simply demonstrates that the characterization is irrelevant to consumption. Whether audiences consider Dhurandhar propaganda, patriotism, or pure entertainment, they watch it in similar numbers and with similar enthusiasm. The debate exists primarily among the cultural commentariat, and its participants may overestimate its influence on the viewing public.

University campuses have become a particularly intense site for the debate. Student organizations affiliated with both ruling and opposition parties have organized screenings, counter-screenings, panel discussions, and protests around Dhurandhar. Campus debates have reproduced the national pattern in miniature: polarized positions, ad hominem accusations, and an absence of genuinely undecided participants. Several universities have incorporated the blockbuster into their media studies curricula, treating the debate as a case study in how democracies process state violence through popular culture. Academic treatment of the debate has been more methodologically rigorous than its journalistic counterpart, but academic analysis reaches a fraction of the audience and operates on publication timelines measured in years rather than news cycles.

Where Film and Reality Converge

The propaganda-vs-patriotism binary misses the most interesting analytical finding: Dhurandhar sits on a spectrum, and its position on that spectrum is neither pure propaganda nor pure art. The propaganda-vs-art spectrum has five identifiable positions, and placing Dhurandhar accurately requires examining evidence for each.

Position one on the spectrum is pure state propaganda. In pure state propaganda, the government commissions the work, controls the message, funds the production, and distributes the product through state channels. North Korean cinema operates at this position. Soviet socialist realist films operated at this position. The Office of War Information’s collaboration with Hollywood during World War II operated near this position. The defining characteristic is that the state is both the source and the beneficiary of the message, with minimal creative independence for the artist.

Dhurandhar does not occupy this position. No credible evidence has emerged that the Indian government commissioned the film, controlled its script, or directed its production. The film was produced by a private studio, funded through commercial channels, and distributed through standard theatrical and digital platforms. The director has stated repeatedly that his creative decisions were independent, and no documentary evidence has contradicted this claim. Critics who place Dhurandhar at position one on the spectrum are making an accusation that the evidence does not support.

Position two is state-adjacent propaganda. At this position, the state does not produce the work but actively facilitates it through privileged access, institutional cooperation, and post-production endorsement. The Pentagon’s collaboration with Hollywood is the canonical example: the Department of Defense provides equipment, personnel, locations, and technical consultation to films that portray the military favorably, and withholds cooperation from films that do not. The filmmakers retain creative control, but the state’s cooperation shapes the final product through access and approval. The film is not state propaganda but state-supported cinema.

The evidence for placing Dhurandhar at position two is mixed. Production reports have not documented the kind of institutional cooperation that characterizes the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship. India does not have a formal institutional mechanism for military-entertainment cooperation comparable to the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Liaison Office. Individual consultations with retired intelligence officers are standard practice for any thriller based on real events and do not constitute state cooperation. The tax exemptions and awards, however, push Dhurandhar closer to this position than its makers would prefer to acknowledge. State facilitation after production is still state facilitation.

Position three is commercial patriotism. At this position, the filmmakers are driven primarily by market incentives rather than ideological commitment. They identify an audience appetite for nationalist content, produce content that satisfies that appetite, and profit from the transaction. The ideological effect is a byproduct of commercial strategy, not its purpose. Komal Nahta’s defense of Dhurandhar explicitly places it here: filmmakers follow money, nationalist sentiment is where the money is, and producing a film that audiences want to see is commerce, not propaganda.

Significant evidence supports placing Dhurandhar at position three. The film’s production timeline coincided with a measurable surge in audience appetite for counter-terrorism narratives, a surge documented across the ranking of Bollywood counter-terror films. The production house had a track record of genre filmmaking driven by commercial analysis rather than political commitment. The marketing campaign emphasized entertainment value, star power, and spectacle rather than political messaging. The commercial patriotism reading explains the film’s existence without requiring any theory of state coordination.

Position four is genuine artistic engagement with national trauma. At this position, the filmmaker uses the material of national security as raw material for artistic exploration, the way Kathryn Bigelow used the bin Laden hunt in Zero Dark Thirty or Oliver Stone used the Vietnam War in Platoon. The artist may take a position, but the position emerges from the artistic process rather than preceding it. The work has enough moral complexity to resist reduction to a single political message.

Dhurandhar’s claim to position four is its weakest. The scene-by-scene fact check revealed that the film consistently resolved moral ambiguity in favor of the operative. Every operational decision that could have been presented as a genuine ethical dilemma, killing a target in a mosque, operating on sovereign territory without permission, accepting collateral consequences, is presented as obviously correct within the film’s moral universe. The operative never doubts. The film never lingers on consequences. Artistic engagement with national trauma requires the artist to sit in the discomfort of the material, and Dhurandhar does not sit. It sprints.

Position five is subversive critique. At this position, the work uses the aesthetics of nationalism to interrogate nationalism itself. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is the canonical example: a film that looks like military propaganda but functions as a satire of military propaganda, requiring the audience to recognize the irony. No serious analyst has placed Dhurandhar at position five. The film contains no ironic distance from its own nationalism, no subversive layer beneath the patriotic surface. What you see is what you get.

The honest analytical assessment places Dhurandhar between positions two and three: primarily commercial patriotism with elements of state-adjacent facilitation. The film was not commissioned by the state, but the state created an environment in which producing such a film was commercially rational, and the state rewarded the production after the fact in ways that encouraged future productions in the same vein. This is not propaganda in the traditional sense, but it is not purely independent art, either. The distinction matters because the solutions for each position differ. State propaganda requires censorship reform. State-adjacent facilitation requires transparency about institutional cooperation. Commercial patriotism requires nothing but audience sophistication, which is a much harder problem to solve.

Understanding why Dhurandhar sits between positions two and three requires examining the ecosystem that connects the state, the entertainment industry, and the audience. No single actor in this ecosystem is doing anything unprecedented or illegitimate. Governments have always praised cultural products that align with their policies. Entertainment industries have always pursued profitable audience appetites. Audiences have always preferred narratives that confirm their beliefs over narratives that challenge them. Each actor’s behavior is individually rational and individually defensible. The problematic phenomenon emerges not from any single actor’s choices but from the system they collectively create.

Consider the incentive structure from the production house’s perspective. Producing a counter-terrorism thriller that celebrates Indian capability carries minimal commercial risk: the audience appetite is documented, the political environment is favorable, and the risk of governmental or social media backlash is low. Producing a counter-terrorism thriller that questions Indian methods carries substantial commercial risk: the audience appetite for moral complexity in this genre is unproven, the political environment punishes perceived anti-national content, and social media campaigns against the production could reduce box office returns. Under these incentive conditions, a rational production house will choose celebration over interrogation every time, not because anyone directed the choice but because the incentive structure makes any other choice commercially irrational. The state did not need to commission Dhurandhar. It needed only to create conditions under which Dhurandhar was the commercially obvious thing to produce.

This incentive-structure analysis is crucial because it identifies the mechanism of propaganda without requiring a conspiracy theory. Critics who call Dhurandhar propaganda often imply coordinated state action: phone calls from political operatives, script approvals from intelligence agencies, funding from party-affiliated entities. No evidence supports these implications. The incentive-structure model explains the same outcome without requiring any such coordination. When speaking at a rally generates thousands of social media attacks on the speaker, fewer people speak at rallies. When producing a morally complex counter-terrorism thriller generates thousands of social media attacks on the production house, fewer production houses attempt moral complexity. The censorship is structural rather than directed, invisible rather than visible, and vastly more effective than any government censor could be because it operates through market forces rather than legal authority.

Defenders of Dhurandhar are correct that market forces drove the production. Critics of Dhurandhar are correct that market forces were shaped by political conditions. Both observations are true simultaneously, and the spectrum analysis accommodates both without contradiction. The analytical error is to treat market forces as natural and apolitical. Market forces in the entertainment industry are always shaped by the political environment in which they operate. In an environment where nationalist content is commercially rewarded and critical content is commercially punished, market forces will produce nationalist content. This is not a conspiracy. It is an ecosystem.

International comparisons illuminate this ecosystem dynamic with precision. Hollywood’s post-September 11 output followed an identical pattern: in the five years following the attacks, American studios produced dozens of films celebrating military and intelligence operations (Black Hawk Down, Lone Survivor, Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty) and almost none questioning them (the few that did, such as In the Valley of Elah and Redacted, performed poorly at the box office). No evidence suggests that the American government directed this production pattern. Market forces, shaped by the post-September 11 political environment, produced it organically. Israel’s entertainment industry shows the same pattern with a longer time horizon: the celebration phase lasted roughly two decades before the interrogation phase produced films like Waltz with Bashir and Foxtrot that questioned the state’s use of force. In each case, the market responded to political conditions without requiring state direction, and in each case, critics accused the celebratory output of being propaganda while defenders insisted it was merely entertainment. Dhurandhar’s position on the spectrum is not unique. It is the Indian manifestation of a universal democratic phenomenon.

French cinema offers an additional data point that enriches the spectrum analysis. France has conducted extensive covert operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia through the DGSE and its predecessors. French entertainment cinema has engaged with these operations through a lens that combines celebration with ambiguity in ways that neither the American nor the Israeli model fully captures. Films like Alain Corneau’s Le Choix des armes and more recent productions about French special forces operations in the Sahel present operatives as competent professionals operating in morally gray environments, but they do so within a cultural tradition that prizes philosophical questioning more than Anglo-American commercial cinema. French critics do not conduct the same propaganda-vs-patriotism debate that consumes Indian and American commentary, partly because French cinematic culture expects moral ambiguity as a baseline rather than as an exception. India’s cinematic culture does not share this expectation, and the absence of a moral-ambiguity baseline is what makes Dhurandhar’s uncomplicated heroism both commercially rational and culturally significant.

South Korean cinema provides perhaps the most instructive comparison for India’s trajectory. South Korea has produced both celebratory and interrogative treatments of its national security apparatus within a compressed timeframe. Films like Northern Limit Line celebrate military sacrifice in ways that parallel Dhurandhar’s tone, while films like Joint Security Area and The Spy Gone North examine the costs and contradictions of national security operations with genuine complexity. South Korea’s entertainment industry produces both types simultaneously, serving different audience segments within the same market. India’s entertainment industry has not yet achieved this bifurcation: the market for celebratory counter-terrorism content is vast and proven, while the market for interrogative counter-terrorism content is unproven and commercially risky. South Korea’s example suggests that bifurcation will eventually occur, but it requires either a maturing audience that demands complexity or a sufficiently secure political environment that does not punish it.

Turkish cinema offers a cautionary example of what happens when the celebration phase becomes permanent and the interrogation phase never arrives. Films like Valley of the Wolves celebrate Turkish intelligence operations with a moral simplicity that exceeds even Dhurandhar’s. The Turkish entertainment industry operates within a political environment where critical treatment of national security is effectively impossible: journalists who question military operations face prosecution, and filmmakers who attempt moral complexity face distribution barriers. Turkey’s example is not India’s future, but it represents one possible trajectory if the political environment continues to compress the space for critical cultural production. India’s democratic resilience, demonstrated by the very existence of the nationalism debate, distinguishes it from the Turkish case, but the direction of travel matters as much as the current position.

What these international comparisons collectively reveal is that Dhurandhar is neither exceptional nor innocent. Every democracy that fights covert wars produces celebratory entertainment during the active phase of those wars. Every such democracy also eventually produces interrogative entertainment after enough temporal distance accumulates. India’s contribution to this pattern is its unique temporal compression: celebrating operations that are ongoing, classified, and officially denied. This compression distinguishes the Indian case from all precedents and makes the nationalism debate more consequential than its counterparts in other democracies, because the cultural work of celebration may be shaping the operational environment in real time rather than merely processing it retrospectively.

The incentive structure analysis, the international comparisons, and the spectrum framework converge on a conclusion that neither the propaganda accusation nor the entertainment defense captures. Dhurandhar exists at a specific position on a universal spectrum, produced by identifiable market forces operating within a specific political environment, performing cultural work that has identifiable consequences for democratic governance. Calling this “propaganda” overstates the state’s role and understates the market’s role. Calling this “entertainment” overstates the production’s innocence and understates the consequences. The accurate term is “commercial nationalist cinema,” a category that encompasses American Sniper, the Valley of the Wolves franchise, Northern Limit Line, and Dhurandhar alike. Each instance in the category serves different national projects, but the structural dynamics are identical across cases.

Where Film and Reality Diverge

A significant gap separates what the nationalism debate claims from what the evidence supports, and that gap is revealing. Both sides of the debate, accusers and defenders, make claims that diverge from the available evidence in instructive ways.

The propaganda accusation diverges from reality in three specific ways.

Government direction is the first point where the propaganda accusation diverges from reality. Critics who call Dhurandhar propaganda frequently imply, and sometimes explicitly claim, that the government directed the film’s production. Phrases like “BJP film” and “Modi propaganda” have appeared in hundreds of op-eds and thousands of social media posts. Behind these phrases lies an assumption that the production operated at the behest of the ruling party to build public support for a specific policy. No evidence supports this claim. Production history is traceable through standard industry documentation: development began before the specific real-world events that the film most closely parallels, the production house had no documented ties to the ruling party, and the creative team’s prior filmography shows no pattern of political alignment. At its most extreme, the propaganda accusation treats coincidence of ideological direction as evidence of coordination, which is a logical error.

A second divergence concerns the uniqueness of the phenomenon. Critics treat Dhurandhar as though it were unprecedented in democratic cinema, a rupture in the normal functioning of entertainment industries. Historical records contradict this framing completely. American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and released in 2014, became the highest-grossing war film in American history while generating an identical debate about whether it constituted propaganda or patriotism. Eastwood presented a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper as an uncomplicated hero, omitted the moral complexity of the Iraq War, and was embraced by military families and political conservatives while being condemned by anti-war critics. American Sniper earned over five hundred million dollars globally without any documented government direction of its production. British cinema produced a stream of empire-sympathetic content throughout the post-war period without central direction. Israeli cinema swings between revenge celebration and moral interrogation in cycles that correlate with security conditions rather than government intervention. Dhurandhar is not an anomaly. It is India’s entry in a pattern visible across every democracy that has fought an asymmetric war.

Audience agency is the third point where the propaganda accusation diverges from evidence. Critics implicitly treat viewers as passive recipients of ideological messaging, manipulated by the production into accepting positions they would otherwise reject. Media studies research has consistently challenged this model of audience behavior. Audiences bring their pre-existing beliefs to the cinema and select entertainment that confirms those beliefs. Viewers who watched Dhurandhar and clapped during the elimination sequences did not need a Bollywood production to tell them that killing terrorists is acceptable. They already believed it. Ranveer Singh’s performance confirmed their belief, amplified it, and gave it aesthetic expression, but it did not create it. Causal arrows point from audience to screen as much as from screen to audience, and the propaganda accusation reverses the direction.

Taken together, these three divergences do not exonerate the film or invalidate all criticism. What they do is narrow the accusation to its defensible core. Dhurandhar is not government-directed propaganda in the classical sense. It is not unprecedented in democratic cinema. And it does not brainwash passive audiences into positions they would otherwise reject. Once these overstatements are stripped away, what remains is a more precise and more troubling charge: that the film operates within a political ecosystem that incentivizes nationalist content production, that the state rewards such production after the fact through tax exemptions and awards, and that the cumulative effect of these market-state interactions normalizes a specific political posture that makes democratic oversight of covert operations more difficult. This narrower charge is harder to dismiss than the broader one, precisely because it does not require proving government direction, historical uniqueness, or audience passivity.

Defenders’ claims diverge from reality in equally specific ways.

Intention versus effect is where the entertainment defense first breaks down. Defenders argue that because the filmmakers intended to make entertainment, the result cannot be propaganda. This argument conflates intention with function. Any production can function as propaganda regardless of its creators’ intentions if it performs the cultural work that propaganda performs: normalizing a contested policy position, building emotional support for state action, and delegitimizing dissent. Dhurandhar performs all three functions. Whether the filmmakers intended these effects is irrelevant to whether the effects occur. Confusing intention with function is common across nationalist cinema debates globally and is equally weak in every case.

Quality versus ideology presents a second breakdown in the entertainment defense. Defenders argue that artistic quality distinguishes Dhurandhar from propaganda. This argument assumes that propaganda must be artistically inferior, an assumption contradicted by the entire history of state-supported cinema. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is widely considered one of the most technically accomplished documentaries ever made. Soviet cinema produced genuine artistic masterpieces within a system of total state control. Quality and ideological function are not mutually exclusive categories, and using quality as a defense against the propaganda charge is analytically naive.

False equivalence with global cinema represents a third breakdown. Defenders argue that American and Israeli cinema produce similar content, so criticizing Dhurandhar for nationalism is a double standard. Logically, this argument is sound, but its strategic deployment is revealing. Defenders who invoke the global comparison when defending against criticism would never accept the comparison when it runs in the opposite direction. If the Bollywood hit is comparable to American Sniper, then criticism of it is also comparable to criticism of American Sniper, and that criticism was not dismissed in America as “anti-national.” Global comparisons work as a defense only when applied symmetrically, and defenders apply them asymmetrically.

Both sides’ divergences from evidence share a common structural feature: each side selects the framing that maximizes its rhetorical advantage while ignoring evidence that complicates its position. Propaganda accusers focus on state tax exemptions while ignoring the absence of production-stage government involvement. Entertainment defenders focus on creative independence during production while ignoring the state facilitation that occurred after release. Each side’s evidence is real but partial, and the partiality is strategic rather than accidental. A complete analysis requires integrating both sides’ valid evidence into a framework that neither side would endorse, because that framework would require both sides to surrender their most emotionally satisfying conclusions. The propaganda accusers would have to acknowledge that market forces, not state direction, drove the film’s creation. Entertainment defenders would have to acknowledge that commercial independence during production does not insulate a film from performing political functions after release. Neither concession is likely in a debate that functions as a proxy war for larger political conflicts, which is precisely why the debate continues without resolution and will continue for the foreseeable future.

What the Comparison Reveals

Dhurandhar’s nationalism debate reveals three things about India that transcend the question of one movie.

India’s stage of processing state violence is the first revelation. Democracies that conduct covert operations pass through identifiable phases in how they discuss those operations culturally. Phase one is denial: the state denies the operations exist, and cultural production avoids the topic. Phase two is celebration: the operations become public knowledge, and cultural production celebrates them as evidence of state capability. Phase three is interrogation: enough time passes that artists begin questioning the moral costs of the operations, and cultural production becomes morally complex. Phase four is normalization: the operations become routine, and cultural production treats them as background rather than foreground.

Israel passed through all four phases over roughly four decades. The Wrath of God operations of the early 1970s were denied until the late 1980s, celebrated in popular culture through the 1990s, interrogated by Spielberg’s Munich in 2005, and normalized in contemporary Israeli thriller fiction where Mossad operations are unremarkable plot devices. The United States passed through the same phases with the bin Laden hunt: denial through the early 2000s, celebration after the raid in 2011, interrogation by Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, and normalization in subsequent thriller fiction. The phasing correlates with temporal distance from the original events: celebration dominates when operations are recent, interrogation emerges after a generation of distance.

India appears to be firmly in phase two. The shadow war’s operations are recent, ongoing, and unacknowledged by the government. Cultural production about the operations, led by Dhurandhar, is celebratory without exception. No Indian film has attempted a Munich-style interrogation of the shadow war’s moral costs. The comparison with Israel’s approach to covert operations and the cultural processing that followed is instructive: Israel had the luxury of temporal distance before its cultural industry began asking hard questions. India’s cultural industry is producing celebration before the operations are even officially acknowledged, which is historically unprecedented.

The question the nationalism debate actually asks is whether India will ever reach phase three: the interrogation phase where cultural production examines rather than celebrates state violence. The debate itself may be early evidence that the interrogation has already begun, but it has begun in the critical response rather than in the cinema itself. The critics are in phase three; the filmmakers are in phase two; the audience is split. The temporal compression, celebrating operations that are still ongoing and still officially denied, creates a unique dynamic that the Israeli and American precedents do not fully explain.

Entertainment and democratic accountability constitute the second revelation. A functioning democracy requires mechanisms for holding the state accountable for its use of force. These mechanisms include legislative oversight, judicial review, media scrutiny, and public debate. Each mechanism depends on public awareness: citizens cannot hold the state accountable for actions they do not know about, do not understand, or have been culturally conditioned to support uncritically.

Each of these mechanisms is complicated by the cultural environment. Legislative oversight of India’s covert operations doctrine is minimal, and the blockbuster does not prompt viewers to demand more. Judicial review of extrajudicial killings on foreign soil is nonexistent, and nothing in the narrative prompts viewers to question this absence. Media scrutiny operates within a framework where Dhurandhar-style has become the default vocabulary for describing real operations, a vocabulary borrowed from entertainment rather than from law, ethics, or strategy. Public debate is structured by the anti-national accusation: questioning the film’s politics is framed as questioning the country’s right to defend itself, which is a false equivalence that suppresses genuine deliberation.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s framework illuminates this problem with precision. Mehta argues that democracy requires citizens who are capable of being uncomfortable with their government’s power, even when that power is exercised against enemies they genuinely fear. The democratic citizen does not oppose the state’s right to defend itself. The democratic citizen insists that the state’s exercise of that right remain subject to scrutiny, debate, and legal constraint. The democratic citizen watches Dhurandhar and enjoys the thriller while retaining the capacity to ask: is the real version of this legal? Is it effective? Is it creating more enemies than it eliminates? Is it accountable? Mehta’s concern is not that citizens watch the production. His concern is that they watch and stop asking.

The evidence for this concern is mixed. Polling data on public attitudes toward counter-terrorism suggests that Indian citizens overwhelmingly support the government’s right to conduct operations against terrorists on foreign soil. This support predated Dhurandhar and does not appear to have been created by the film. Whether the film has deepened or calcified this support to the point where scrutiny is foreclosed is a question that existing research cannot answer definitively. The concern is plausible but unproven.

What is demonstrable, however, is the effect on institutional discourse. Parliamentary discussions about intelligence accountability have not referenced the film directly, but the cultural environment that Dhurandhar both reflects and reinforces has made it politically costly for legislators to advocate greater oversight of covert operations. A parliamentarian who argues for an intelligence oversight committee modeled on Britain’s ISC or America’s SSCI risks being portrayed as obstructing the very operations that the country’s most popular film celebrates. The political calculation is straightforward: the electoral cost of appearing to constrain counter-terrorism exceeds the electoral benefit of improving accountability. This calculation existed before Dhurandhar, but the cultural environment has widened the gap between cost and benefit. When the nation’s highest-grossing film treats covert operations as self-evidently heroic, advocating oversight becomes self-evidently unpopular, regardless of the policy merits. The RAW institutional analysis documents how India’s external intelligence agency has historically operated with minimal legislative oversight, and the celebratory cultural environment makes reform of this structural deficit even less politically viable than it was before the film’s release.

Media organizations face an analogous pressure. Investigative journalists who report critically on specific covert operations risk accusations of endangering national security, accusations that carry more cultural weight when the operations in question have been sanitized by commercial cinema. Before Dhurandhar, a journalist investigating a specific cross-border operation could frame the investigation as accountability journalism within a democratic framework. After the production, the same investigation invites the frame of betrayal: you are undermining what Dhurandhar’s protagonist fought for. The framing is irrational, as journalism about real operations has no relationship to fictional depictions of imagined ones, but cultural environments shape emotional reactions more than logical analysis, and the emotional reaction to perceived betrayal is more politically potent than the logical case for transparency.

The third revelation concerns the nationalism debate itself as a political instrument. This ongoing argument is not a neutral scholarly exchange. It is a political battlefield where positions correlate with party alignment more than with analytical method. Supporters of the ruling party tend to defend the film as patriotic entertainment. Opponents of the ruling party tend to criticize it as propaganda. The correlation is not perfect, and genuinely independent analysts exist on both sides, but the correlation is strong enough that the debate has become a proxy war for broader political conflicts that have nothing to do with cinema.

This instrumentalization of the debate has damaged its analytical utility. When film criticism becomes a loyalty test, critics modulate their analysis to avoid political consequences rather than to arrive at truth. Self-censorship is not visible in what gets published but in what does not get published: the moderate analyses, the genuinely ambivalent assessments, the arguments that acknowledge both the film’s artistic merits and its political effects without reducing to either the propaganda accusation or the entertainment defense. These moderate voices exist, but they are drowned out by the polarized extremes that generate engagement, clicks, and television appearances.

The international comparison reinforces this dynamic. Hollywood’s propaganda-vs-patriotism debate over American Sniper was loud, polarized, and ultimately inconsequential: the debate burned hot for three months and then disappeared. Israeli debates over nationalist cinema follow a similar pattern: intense bursts of argument that fade when the next news cycle arrives. India’s Dhurandhar debate has persisted longer than either precedent, partly because the operations it depicts are ongoing (American Sniper depicted a concluded war; Munich depicted operations that ended thirty years earlier) and partly because the political environment transforms every cultural argument into a proxy for the fundamental question of what kind of country India is becoming.

The anti-national accusation deserves specific attention because it is the mechanism through which the debate is suppressed rather than resolved. When critics of the blockbuster are labeled anti-national, the accusation performs three political functions simultaneously. It delegitimizes the critic by questioning their loyalty rather than their argument. It redirects the debate from the film’s content to the critic’s patriotism, which is a topic on which the critic is automatically defensive. And it sends a signal to other potential critics that dissent carries social and professional costs.

Beyond its formal political spheres, the anti-national label is not unique to the Dhurandhar debate. It has been deployed against journalists, academics, activists, and opposition politicians across a range of issues. Its use in the cinema debate is notable because it reveals how far the label has spread: if questioning a Bollywood film’s politics can trigger the anti-national accusation, then the space for any criticism of any cultural product that aligns with government positions has been radically compressed. The anti-national accusation is not an argument about Dhurandhar. It is a method for closing the argument about Dhurandhar, and every democracy should recognize the pattern.

How other democracies handle similar debates is illuminating. American critics of American Sniper were called unpatriotic on social media, but the accusation carried no institutional consequences. Michael Moore, who called the film propaganda on Twitter, continued to work without interruption. Chris Hedges, who wrote extensive critiques, faced no professional penalty. In India, the anti-national accusation carries institutional weight that the American equivalent does not. Critics who have been labeled anti-national have faced pressure from their employers, social media harassment campaigns, and, in some cases, legal threats under sedition statutes that have no American parallel. The institutional weight of the accusation is what distinguishes India’s nationalism debate from its Western counterparts.

Honest assessment of what the nationalism debate reveals leads to this conclusion: the argument is not really about one Bollywood production. It is about whether India’s democratic institutions are robust enough to absorb a covert war without losing the capacity for self-criticism. Every democracy that has conducted covert operations has faced this test. The United States has passed it imperfectly: Abu Ghraib was exposed, debated, and prosecuted, but Guantanamo persists. Israel has passed it imperfectly: internal debate about occupation is vigorous, but the debate has not changed policy. India is taking the test now, and Dhurandhar is one of the examination papers.

RAW’s complete institutional history reveals an agency that has evolved from a defensive intelligence service to an offensive counter-terrorism instrument over five decades. The cultural products that accompany this evolution, from the romanticized spy fiction of the Tiger franchise through the operationalized violence of Dhurandhar, track the institutional trajectory precisely. The films do not cause the institutional evolution. They reflect it, accelerate it, and make it popular. The nationalism debate is really a debate about whether the reflection, acceleration, and popularization have outrun the democratic checks that should constrain the institution being celebrated.

One question remains unanswered, and no op-ed, academic paper, or television debate has satisfactorily addressed it: what would change if the debate were resolved? Suppose the propaganda accusation were proven: the government did commission Dhurandhar, did control its content, did direct its distribution. What remedy would follow? Censorship of government-aligned cinema is incompatible with democratic governance and would constitute a greater threat to democracy than the propaganda itself. Mandatory moral complexity in entertainment cinema is enforceable only by authoritarian regimes, and the enforcement would prove the critics’ point about the state they are criticizing.

Conversely, suppose the entertainment defense were proven: Dhurandhar is purely commercial, the government had no involvement, and the audience chose the film freely. What changes? The film’s political effects persist regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions. The Dhurandhar-style terminology still dominates media coverage of real operations. The audience still watches real motorcycle-borne assassinations through a cinematic lens that makes them feel like Ranveer Singh’s victories. The entertainment defense, even if correct, does not address the consequences.

This is the core analytical finding: the propaganda-vs-patriotism debate is the wrong debate. The right debate is about consequences, and the consequences are the same regardless of whether Dhurandhar is propaganda, patriotism, commercial exploitation, or genuine art. The film normalizes extrajudicial killing. It provides a vocabulary for discussing real operations that bypasses legal and ethical frameworks. It builds emotional support for a policy that the government will not officially acknowledge. And it does all of this whether the filmmaker intended it or not, whether the government directed it or not, and whether the audience knows it or not.

The productive question is not whether Dhurandhar is propaganda. The productive question is whether India’s democratic institutions, its judiciary, its parliament, its free press, its civil society, are strong enough to maintain accountability for covert operations while the population is emotionally invested in those operations’ success. The handler character analysis showed how the film constructs an idealized version of intelligence leadership that real institutions cannot match. The gap between the film’s RAW and the real RAW is not just a narrative convenience. It is a political problem: citizens who believe the idealized version will resist oversight of the real version.

The nationalism debate will not resolve because it is structurally irresolvable within its own terms. Propaganda and patriotism are not mutually exclusive categories. A film can be both propaganda and patriotism simultaneously, and Dhurandhar is. It is propaganda in the functional sense: it normalizes a contested state policy. It is patriotism in the emotional sense: the emotions it generates are genuine responses to genuine grievances. The coexistence of both functions in a single cultural product is not a contradiction. It is the normal condition of nationalist cinema in every democracy that has fought a covert war. India is not exceptional. The debate that treats India as exceptional misses the pattern and therefore misses the analytical payoff.

Here is the analytical payoff: the question is not whether this blockbuster is propaganda. All nationalist cinema serves propagandistic functions, whether American, Israeli, or Indian. The question is whether the specific type of cultural work it performs, the normalization of extrajudicial killing as heroism, serves or damages democratic self-governance. The answer depends not on the film but on the institutions that surround it. If India’s judiciary, legislature, and press maintain the capacity to scrutinize covert operations regardless of their popularity, then the blockbuster is harmless entertainment. If those institutions lose that capacity, then it is one of many cultural products that contributed to the loss. No single production is the disease. It is the symptom. And treating symptoms while ignoring the underlying condition is a strategy that has never worked, in medicine or in democracy.

The IC-814 sequence in the film illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The film’s recreation of India’s most humiliating hostage crisis serves a specific narrative function: it establishes the wound that justifies the revenge. The IC-814 hijacking, the release of Masood Azhar, the decades of attacks that followed, and the shadow war that responded to those attacks form a chain that the film presents as a closed moral argument. The humiliation of Kandahar justifies the operations in Karachi. The audience accepts this argument because the film presents it emotionally rather than analytically, and emotional arguments bypass the critical faculties that would otherwise interrogate the chain’s logical gaps. The gaps are real: does humiliation at Kandahar justify extrajudicial killing in Karachi twenty years later? Does the failure of diplomatic solutions justify the abandonment of diplomatic solutions? Does the undeniable horror of terrorism justify a response that operates outside every legal framework that democratic states have built? These are the questions a phase-three film would ask. Dhurandhar, firmly in phase two, does not ask them. And the nationalism debate, locked in the propaganda-vs-patriotism binary, does not ask them either.

Perhaps the real contribution of the Dhurandhar nationalism debate to Indian public discourse may not be the debate itself but the fact that it exists. In a cultural environment where questioning the state’s counter-terrorism apparatus carries significant social costs, the debate’s persistence is itself evidence of democratic resilience. The critics who call Dhurandhar propaganda are exercising exactly the democratic faculty that they worry the film is eroding. The fact that they can publish their criticism, that it reaches millions of readers, that it generates sustained engagement, is proof that the capacity for self-criticism has not been extinguished. The debate may be polarized, instrumentalized, and frequently conducted in bad faith by both sides, but it is happening. In this sense, the nationalism debate is both the threat and the immune response.

Spielberg’s Munich, the comparison Dhurandhar’s critics most frequently invoke, reveals by contrast what India’s cinema has not yet produced but eventually will. Munich was made thirty-three years after the events it depicts. The temporal distance allowed Spielberg to show Avner Kaufman’s moral deterioration, to present the Palestinian targets as human beings with families, and to end the film not with triumph but with doubt. The film’s final image, the Twin Towers visible in the Manhattan skyline, connects the Israeli revenge campaign to American revenge campaigns and implies that the cycle never ends. Munich asked whether the killing was worth the cost, and it answered: maybe not.

India’s Dhurandhar was made while the events it parallels are still unfolding. The temporal proximity prohibits the moral distance that Munich achieved. The operations are ongoing. The targets are still being tracked and eliminated. The government that conducts them is still in power. The audience that watches the film may have relatives serving in the security forces or may have been personally affected by the attacks that the film depicts. Under these conditions, expecting moral complexity from commercial cinema is unrealistic. The celebration phase is the natural cultural response to ongoing conflict, and no amount of critical hand-wringing will accelerate the transition to the interrogation phase. That transition will come, if it comes at all, when the operations are concluded, the threat has receded, and the country has enough distance from its fear to examine what it did while afraid. Until that distance arrives, the nationalism debate will continue to generate more heat than light, because the participants are too close to the fire to see the shape of what is burning.

The nationalism debate around Dhurandhar is, in the final analysis, an argument about timing. The critics are demanding phase three while the country is still in phase two. The defenders are insisting that phase two is permanent, that celebration is the only appropriate response, and that interrogation is betrayal. Both positions are historically naive. The critics are premature; the defenders are ahistorical. The comparative record suggests that phase three will arrive, that India will eventually produce its own Munich, and that when it does, the Dhurandhar debate will be remembered as the early tremor that preceded the earthquake.

Until then, the debate performs a function that neither side acknowledges: it keeps the question alive. As long as Indians are arguing about whether Dhurandhar is propaganda or patriotism, they are also, whether they recognize it or not, arguing about what kind of democracy they want to live in. That argument is worth having, even when it is conducted badly. The alternative, silence, is worse.

The institutional dimension of this debate deserves closer examination because it reveals structural weaknesses that extend far beyond cinema. India’s parliamentary system does not have a dedicated intelligence oversight committee comparable to the United States Congress’s Select Committee on Intelligence or the United Kingdom’s Intelligence and Security Committee. The absence of formal legislative oversight means that the shadow war, which Dhurandhar celebrates, operates without the institutional scrutiny that peer democracies consider essential. Cultural celebration of unsupervised operations is more consequential in an institutional environment that already lacks oversight than it would be in a system with robust checks. When Americans watched Zero Dark Thirty, they knew that the operations depicted were subject to congressional oversight, legal review, and inspector general audits, however imperfect those mechanisms might be. When Indians watch Dhurandhar, the operations depicted operate outside any comparable framework. The cultural celebration does not create the oversight gap, but it reduces public pressure to close it.

Judicial oversight of covert operations presents a parallel structural gap. Indian courts have occasionally addressed questions related to intelligence operations, but no judicial framework exists for reviewing the legality of specific covert actions conducted on foreign soil. The Supreme Court of India has not been asked to rule on the shadow war’s legality, and no constitutional challenge to the operations has been filed. In this judicial vacuum, cultural products like Dhurandhar perform a legitimizing function that formal legal review would otherwise provide: they tell the public that the operations are acceptable, not through legal reasoning but through narrative satisfaction. The catharsis of the third act substitutes for the deliberation of a courtroom. Contrast this with the American experience, where the legality of targeted killings generated extensive judicial commentary, executive legal memoranda, and congressional debate, even as the operations continued. The legal infrastructure of accountability exists in the American system regardless of whether it functions perfectly. In India, the legal infrastructure does not exist, and the cultural environment makes its creation less likely by framing the operations as self-evidently righteous rather than as exercises of state power requiring legal justification.

Media scrutiny, the third pillar of democratic accountability, has been compromised by the same cultural dynamics that Dhurandhar both reflects and accelerates. Journalists who cover the shadow war face dual pressures: from national security concerns that limit access to information, and from audience preferences that punish critical coverage. A journalist who writes an investigative piece questioning the shadow war’s methods will generate fewer clicks, more social media harassment, and more professional risk than a journalist who writes a celebratory piece adopting the Dhurandhar-style framing. The market incentives that shape entertainment production also shape journalism, and both incentive structures push toward celebration rather than scrutiny.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s scholarship on democratic backsliding provides the theoretical framework for understanding these structural dynamics. Mehta identifies a pattern in which democratic institutions erode not through dramatic constitutional crises but through the gradual attenuation of the norms, practices, and cultural conditions that sustain them. A free press that voluntarily adopts celebratory framing is formally free but functionally constrained. A judiciary that is never asked to review intelligence operations is formally independent but functionally irrelevant. A parliament that does not create an intelligence oversight committee is formally sovereign but functionally disengaged. In each case, the formal structure of democracy remains intact while the substantive practice of democratic accountability recedes. Dhurandhar does not cause this recession. It is one of many cultural indicators that the recession is occurring.

The comparative analysis of how other democracies navigated similar tensions offers both reassurance and warning. After September 11, American civil liberties faced severe strain: the Patriot Act expanded surveillance authority, Guantanamo Bay housed detainees without trial, and CIA black sites conducted interrogations that constituted torture under international law. American popular culture initially celebrated these policies (the television series 24 depicted torture as effective and necessary). Over time, investigative journalism exposed the abuses (Abu Ghraib, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report), cultural production became more complex (The Report, Vice, Zero Dark Thirty’s ambiguous treatment of enhanced interrogation), and public opinion shifted toward greater skepticism of unconstrained executive power. The correction was slow, incomplete, and required a combination of institutional mechanisms (congressional investigations, judicial rulings, presidential executive orders) and cultural shifts (films, documentaries, books that challenged the celebratory consensus).

Israel’s experience provides a longer historical perspective. The celebration of Mossad operations that began in the 1970s persisted for roughly three decades before cultural production began questioning the costs. Avner Kaufman, the protagonist of Munich, embodies the transition: a man who began as a patriotic assassin and ended as a broken exile, unable to enjoy the safety his violence was supposed to create. Israeli cultural production did not undergo this transition because critics demanded it. The transition occurred because enough time passed that artists who had been children during the original operations grew up with enough distance to see the costs alongside the benefits. Generational turnover, not critical argument, drove the shift.

India’s timeline suggests that the generational transition has not yet arrived and cannot be artificially accelerated. The shadow war began in the early 2020s. The audiences who watch Dhurandhar today experienced the Pahalgam massacre, the Pulwama attack, the Mumbai siege, and the IC-814 hijacking as formative events. These audiences have direct emotional stakes in the operations being celebrated. Expecting them to approach those operations with analytical distance is historically unrealistic. The distance will come, but it will come through time, not through debate. The debate can, at best, create a record that the next generation will use when it begins its own interrogation.

The generational dimension deserves deeper examination because it shapes the debate’s trajectory in ways that neither side acknowledges. Younger audiences who grew up consuming counter-terrorism content on streaming platforms, YouTube compilations, and social media clips experience the genre differently from older audiences who remember the attacks themselves. For a twenty-year-old viewer, the Pahalgam massacre is a recent but already mediated event, experienced primarily through news coverage, social media reactions, and political speeches rather than through direct personal terror. This mediation does not reduce the emotional impact; it channels the impact through culturally constructed frames that Dhurandhar both draws from and contributes to. The younger generation’s relationship with the shadow war is fundamentally mediated by entertainment, and the entertainment is celebratory. Whether this generation will eventually produce its own Munich depends on whether it develops the critical distance to question the frames it grew up within, and that development cannot be predicted from the current debate’s trajectory.

Educational institutions play a role in this generational dynamic that extends beyond the campus protests documented in news coverage. Curricula in media studies, political science, international relations, and cultural studies are incorporating the Dhurandhar phenomenon as a teaching case. Students who analyze the nationalism debate in academic settings develop critical frameworks that their non-academic peers do not. This educational bifurcation creates a class-stratified response to nationalist cinema: university-educated audiences who have been taught to recognize propaganda functions coexist with mass audiences who consume the content without analytical mediation. The stratification reinforces the class dynamics identified earlier and suggests that the debate’s resolution, if it arrives, will emerge from educational rather than political institutions.

Religious and communal dimensions of the nationalism debate are discussed in whispers more than in published analysis, but they shape the debate’s emotional infrastructure. Dhurandhar’s narrative presents a clear division between Hindu/Indian victims and Muslim/Pakistani perpetrators. This division aligns with a broader cultural and political project that critics identify as majoritarian nationalism. Defenders argue that the division merely reflects the factual reality of the attacks being depicted: the Pahalgam massacre targeted Hindu tourists, and the perpetrators were Pakistani militants operating from a specific ideological position. Both observations are correct, and neither resolves the debate. Factual accuracy in depicting a communally targeted attack does not settle the question of whether a narrative built on that accuracy normalizes communal division. A factually accurate narrative can still perform ideological work by selecting which facts to foreground, which to omit, and which emotions to amplify. The religious dimension of the debate is the dimension that no participant wants to engage directly, because engaging it requires acknowledging that the terrorism being depicted is itself communal in nature, and the cultural response to communal terrorism inevitably has communal resonance.

The communal dimension becomes especially significant when considered alongside the film’s audience demographics. Dhurandhar was not watched exclusively by Hindu audiences, but its commercial and emotional appeal was strongest among Hindu audiences who identified personally with the victims depicted in the opening sequences. Muslim audiences, including Indian Muslim audiences who are equally patriotic and equally opposed to terrorism, faced a different viewing experience: the film’s moral universe places their co-religionists, however distantly, on the wrong side of a civilizational divide. Indian Muslim critics who raised this concern were dismissed with particular ferocity on social media, accused not merely of being anti-national but of harboring sympathy for the terrorists, an accusation that performs precisely the conflation between religious identity and political loyalty that the critics were trying to expose. The inability of the debate to engage with the communal dimension without collapsing into accusations of disloyalty is itself evidence of the cultural environment’s constraints on honest analysis.

The digital ecosystem in which the debate operates deserves analysis because it has transformed the dynamics of cultural argument in ways that older media could not. On traditional media platforms, editorials, columns, and television debates, the nationalism debate follows conventional argumentative structures: claims, evidence, counter-claims, and analytical frameworks. On social media platforms, the debate operates through different mechanisms: memes, screenshots, quote-tweets, ratio piling, and hashtag campaigns. Social media does not resolve arguments; it amplifies the most emotionally charged positions and suppresses nuanced analysis. The nationalism debate’s social media dimension has been more consequential than its editorial dimension in shaping public perception, because social media reaches the mass audience that editorial pages do not. On Twitter and Instagram, the debate has been reduced to loyalty tests: you are either with Dhurandhar or against India, and the reduction eliminates the analytical space that the debate theoretically occupies.

Algorithmic amplification compounds this reduction. Social media platforms’ recommendation algorithms favor content that generates engagement, and engagement correlates with emotional intensity rather than analytical rigor. Celebratory content about the shadow war generates higher engagement (shares, likes, comments) than critical content, not because the audience is uncritical but because celebration is an emotional response that social media platforms are designed to amplify while criticism is a cognitive response that the same platforms are designed to suppress. The nationalism debate, as conducted on social media, is structurally biased toward the celebratory position, not by editorial decision but by algorithmic design. This structural bias has implications for democratic discourse that extend far beyond the question of one Bollywood production.

Print journalism and longform analysis, the media formats where the debate is conducted most rigorously, reach a diminishing audience. The paradox of the nationalism debate is that its most sophisticated participants (academics, longform critics, constitutional scholars) reach its smallest audience, while its least sophisticated participants (social media commentators, meme creators, hashtag campaigners) reach its largest audience. The debate’s outcome, if it has one, will be determined not by the quality of the arguments but by the distribution channels through which those arguments travel, and the distribution channels favor simplification over sophistication.

One dimension of the nationalism debate that receives insufficient attention is its class dynamics. The debate is conducted primarily in English, in publications and on platforms that cater to an urban, educated, English-speaking minority. Millions of Hindi-speaking viewers who constitute the primary audience are largely absent from the formal debate. Their participation takes the form of viewership, social media engagement, and word-of-mouth recommendation rather than op-eds and academic papers. The class dimension introduces a structural irony: the people arguing most passionately about whether Dhurandhar constitutes propaganda are not the people most affected by whatever propaganda function it performs. The English-speaking commentariat that worries about normalization has the educational resources and critical frameworks to resist normalization. The Hindi-speaking mass audience that does not participate in the formal debate may not.

This class dimension connects to a broader question about democratic elitism. Mehta has written about the tension between democratic participation and democratic quality: the same democratic principles that mandate mass participation also expose democratic systems to majoritarian pressures that can erode minority rights, institutional constraints, and elite-maintained norms. Dhurandhar’s box office success represents a majoritarian expression: the mass audience has spoken, and it has endorsed a narrative that celebrates extrajudicial state violence without qualification. The critical minority that questions this endorsement is exercising a democratic function (dissent, scrutiny, norm-maintenance) that is essential to democracy but inherently counter-majoritarian. The nationalism debate is, at its core, a confrontation between democratic quantity (what the majority wants) and democratic quality (what democratic institutions require), and this confrontation has no resolution that satisfies both sides.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Dhurandhar propaganda?

Dhurandhar functions as propaganda in the technical sense that it normalizes a contested state policy (covert extrajudicial operations on foreign soil) and builds emotional support for that policy among mass audiences. It does not meet the stricter definition of propaganda that requires direct state commissioning or content control. No evidence has emerged that the Indian government directed the film’s production, controlled its script, or funded its creation. The most analytically accurate characterization places Dhurandhar between commercial patriotism and state-adjacent facilitation: the film was commercially motivated, but the state created an environment that made its production commercially rational and rewarded it after the fact through tax exemptions and institutional recognition.

Q: Did the Indian government support the Dhurandhar film?

Several BJP-led state governments offered tax exemptions on cinema tickets for Dhurandhar, which lowered ticket prices and effectively subsidized attendance. The film received a National Film Award, which critics argue constitutes institutional endorsement. Government officials praised the film publicly, and its dialogue was adopted into political speeches at the highest levels. These actions constitute post-production support and endorsement rather than pre-production commissioning or control. The distinction matters: supporting a film after its release is qualitatively different from directing its creation, and conflating the two overstates the government’s role.

Q: Does Dhurandhar normalize extrajudicial killing?

Dhurandhar’s narrative structure presents extrajudicial killing on foreign soil as morally uncomplicated, operationally precise, and emotionally satisfying. The operative faces no moral consequences, no legal scrutiny, and no institutional accountability for his actions. The film does not depict collateral damage, intelligence failures, or wrongful targeting. By presenting extrajudicial killing as consistently righteous and consequence-free, the film normalizes an act that international law, domestic legal frameworks, and democratic accountability principles treat as deeply problematic. Whether this normalization changes individual viewers’ beliefs or merely confirms pre-existing attitudes is debated among media studies scholars.

Q: Is there a difference between patriotic cinema and propaganda?

Theoretically, the distinction is clear but practically blurry. Patriotic cinema celebrates national identity, values, or achievements and may do so critically or uncritically. Propaganda specifically serves the interests of a state or political movement by shaping public opinion toward a predetermined conclusion. In practice, the categories overlap extensively: a film can be genuinely patriotic (reflecting authentic national emotion) while simultaneously performing propagandistic functions (normalizing state policy). The binary framing of the Dhurandhar debate obscures this overlap, which is why the spectrum analysis is more analytically productive than the either-or question.

Q: How does the nationalism debate affect Dhurandhar’s legacy?

The debate has paradoxically enhanced rather than diminished the film’s cultural impact. The controversy extended Dhurandhar’s relevance beyond its theatrical run, ensuring continued media coverage, academic attention, and public discussion long after the box office receipts were counted. Films that generate intense debates about their political meaning achieve a cultural longevity that pure entertainment cannot. Regardless of whether the debate resolves, the production’s position as the touchstone for India’s conversation about cinema, nationalism, and state violence is now permanent. Every subsequent counter-terrorism thriller produced in Bollywood will be measured against its standard, evaluated through its framework, and debated in its shadow. The film has not merely contributed to the conversation about nationalism in Indian cinema. It has become the conversation, defining the terms, the positions, and the emotional stakes for every participant on every side.

Q: Does Dhurandhar damage democratic values?

The relationship between a single film and democratic values is indirect and debatable. Dhurandhar does not, by itself, damage democratic institutions. The concern articulated by political scientists like Pratap Bhanu Mehta is that Dhurandhar is one element in a broader cultural environment that reduces public appetite for holding the state accountable for its use of force. When state violence is celebrated in entertainment, scrutinized less aggressively in media, and defended by politicians who label critics anti-national, the cumulative effect may erode the democratic capacity for self-criticism. The film is a symptom of this environment, not its sole cause.

Q: Is Dhurandhar more propaganda than Hollywood war films?

In its political positioning, the blockbuster operates within the same spectrum as Hollywood war films like American Sniper, Lone Survivor, and 13 Hours, all of which present military operations as morally uncomplicated and were criticized as propaganda by sections of the American public. Pentagon officials actively collaborate with Hollywood productions that portray the military favorably, a relationship that is more institutionalized than any documented cooperation between the Indian government and the Bollywood production house. In structural terms, the Ranveer Singh vehicle is less institutionally connected to the state than many Hollywood military films. In thematic terms, the moral simplicity is comparable.

Q: Can a commercially successful film also be propaganda?

Commercial success and propaganda function are entirely compatible. Some of the most commercially successful films in cinematic history have served propagandistic functions: The Green Berets (1968) was the most commercially successful Vietnam War film of its era and was criticized as government propaganda. American Sniper (2014) earned over five hundred million dollars while generating identical accusations. Commercial success may actually enhance propagandistic effectiveness by ensuring wider audience reach and cultural penetration. The argument that commercial motivation excludes propagandistic function is logically untenable.

Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Munich on moral complexity?

Spielberg’s Munich, released in 2005, depicts the Israeli assassination campaign following the 1972 Munich massacre. The film shows its protagonist, Avner Kaufman, progressively deteriorating as the killings accumulate, questioning the mission’s morality, and ending the film isolated and psychologically damaged. Dhurandhar’s protagonist experiences none of this deterioration. The contrast reveals the difference between phase-two cinema (celebration, which Dhurandhar exemplifies) and phase-three cinema (interrogation, which Munich exemplifies). The comparison is instructive but must account for temporal distance: Munich was made thirty-three years after the events; Dhurandhar was made during the events.

Q: What do film critics say about the nationalism debate?

Film critics are divided along predictable lines. Trade critics who evaluate commercial performance tend to defend the film as quality entertainment that reflects audience appetite. Cultural critics who evaluate ideological function tend to critique the film as morally simplistic. Raja Sen argued that technical excellence enables ideological normalization. Anupama Chopra praised the craft while questioning the moral simplicity. Namrata Joshi analyzed how the film constructs audience identification with the operative in ways that bypass critical thinking. The critical debate mirrors the broader political debate, with individual positions correlating more strongly with the critic’s political orientation than with any objective measure of the film’s quality.

Q: Who funds Bollywood nationalist films?

Bollywood nationalist films are funded through standard commercial channels: private studios, production houses, domestic and international distributors, and private equity investors. The Indian government does not directly fund commercial cinema through production grants in the way that some European governments subsidize their national cinemas. Post-production support through tax exemptions, state-sponsored screenings, and institutional recognition (awards) exists but is qualitatively different from direct funding. The commercial incentive structure, audience demand for nationalist content generates returns that attract private investment, drives production decisions more than any documented political coordination.

Q: Why are critics of Dhurandhar called anti-national?

The anti-national label is deployed as a rhetorical weapon to delegitimize criticism by questioning the critic’s patriotism rather than engaging with their argument. The accusation serves three political functions: it shifts the debate from the film’s content to the critic’s loyalty, it signals to other potential critics that dissent carries social costs, and it aligns criticism of the film with criticism of the country’s defense posture, creating a false equivalence. The anti-national label is not unique to the Dhurandhar debate; it has been applied to journalists, academics, and opposition politicians across multiple issues, indicating a broader rhetorical pattern rather than a film-specific phenomenon.

Q: Will India produce its own Munich-style film about the shadow war?

The comparative record suggests that democracies eventually produce morally complex cultural treatments of their covert operations, but only after significant temporal distance. Israel’s interrogation phase began roughly thirty years after Operation Wrath of God. America’s interrogation phase began roughly ten years after the Iraq invasion. India’s shadow war is ongoing, and the operations the film depicts are still being conducted. Under these conditions, commercial cinema is unlikely to produce moral complexity because audiences in the midst of conflict prefer celebration to interrogation. A Munich-style Indian film about the shadow war will likely emerge only after the operations have concluded and the country has sufficient distance to examine what it did.

Q: How does Dhurandhar affect public opinion on covert operations?

Research on the relationship between entertainment and public opinion suggests that nationalist cinema confirms and amplifies pre-existing attitudes rather than creating new ones. Indian public opinion strongly supported counter-terrorism operations before the blockbuster’s release, and the film’s impact was likely to deepen and emotionalize that support rather than convert opponents into supporters. The film’s more significant effect may be on the vocabulary through which the public discusses real operations: the adoption of Dhurandhar-style as the default media term for covert eliminations replaces analytical language with entertainment language, which may reduce the precision and criticality of public discourse without changing the direction of public opinion.

Q: Is the propaganda label politically motivated?

The propaganda label is partially politically motivated in the sense that it correlates strongly with opposition to the ruling party. Critics who oppose the BJP’s political project are more likely to call Dhurandhar propaganda than critics who support it. This correlation does not invalidate the analytical substance of the propaganda accusation, but it does mean that the label functions as a political signal as well as an analytical category. The challenge for honest analysis is to evaluate the film’s propagandistic functions independent of the evaluator’s political alignment, which few participants in the debate have successfully accomplished.

Q: How did Pakistan’s ban affect the nationalism debate in India?

Pakistan’s decision to ban Dhurandhar locked the Indian debate into a binary frame. Supporters of the film cited the ban as evidence of accuracy: Pakistan would not ban a film that misrepresented the shadow war. Critics cited the ban as evidence of propaganda: even the adversary recognized the film as an instrument of state messaging. Both interpretations are logically valid, and neither is conclusive. The ban’s most significant effect was strategic: it made criticizing Dhurandhar within India more difficult because critics risked being perceived as aligning with Pakistan’s position, a perception that the anti-national label weaponized.

Q: Does Bollywood have a responsibility to be politically balanced?

Commercial cinema has no legal or institutional obligation to be politically balanced. Filmmakers in a democracy are free to produce content that reflects any political perspective, including perspectives that celebrate state violence. The question of responsibility is moral rather than legal, and different ethical frameworks produce different answers. Those who view entertainment as a form of public discourse argue that commercial cinema bears responsibility for its political effects regardless of intent. Those who view entertainment as private commercial activity argue that imposing political-balance requirements on filmmakers is a form of censorship incompatible with creative freedom. The Dhurandhar debate has not resolved this question because the question is, at its core, a question about what kind of democracy India wants to be.

Q: What would resolve the Dhurandhar nationalism debate?

Structurally, the debate is irresolvable within its current terms because propaganda and patriotism are not mutually exclusive categories, and Dhurandhar is both simultaneously. The debate could be productively reframed by shifting from the question of what the film is (propaganda or patriotism) to the question of what the film does (normalize extrajudicial killing, provide entertainment vocabulary for real operations, build emotional support for unacknowledged policy). This reframing moves the analysis from intention to consequence, from the filmmaker’s mind to the audience’s behavior, and from the unanswerable to the empirically testable.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar debate compare to similar debates in other countries?

The Dhurandhar debate follows a pattern visible in every democracy that has fought an asymmetric war. America’s debate over American Sniper, Israel’s debate over revenge cinema, France’s debate over counter-terrorism thrillers, and Britain’s debate over empire-sympathetic films all follow similar trajectories: initial celebration, critical backlash, polarized public argument, eventual exhaustion, and long-term resolution through more nuanced cultural production. India’s debate is distinguished by two factors: the operations it depicts are ongoing (most comparable debates occurred after the operations concluded), and the anti-national accusation carries institutional weight that suppresses dissent more effectively than in Western democracies.

Q: Does the debate matter for India’s counter-terrorism policy?

The debate matters indirectly. Counter-terrorism policy is determined by strategic calculations, intelligence assessments, and political decisions, not by film criticism. The debate’s relevance to policy lies in its effect on the public environment within which policy is made. If the cultural environment eliminates space for questioning the shadow war’s methods, effectiveness, or legal basis, then policymakers face less public pressure to ensure accountability, transparency, and proportionality. Cultural products that build uncritical public support for covert operations do not change policy directly, but they change the political costs of conducting policy without oversight. Lower political costs of unaccountable action are, from a democratic governance perspective, a legitimate concern.