Three Bollywood films released within a decade of each other told India three different stories about what its intelligence agencies do in the dark, and each story moved the national conversation one step closer to open celebration of covert killing on foreign soil.

Baby arrived in January 2015 and whispered a secret most Indians had never heard: your government runs covert counter-terror units that operate outside the law, outside borders, and outside public knowledge. Neeraj Pandey’s clinical thriller treated the covert world with the cold professionalism of a classified briefing, asking audiences to accept that such units exist and that their existence is necessary. Seven months later, Phantom posed a different proposition entirely. Kabir Khan’s film, adapted from Hussain Zaidi’s novel Mumbai Avengers, did not ask whether India should strike back against the masterminds of the 26/11 Mumbai massacre. It assumed the answer was yes and spent two hours showing audiences what that revenge might look like. The tagline said everything the screenplay intended: “A story you wish were true.” Phantom’s genius was not in the execution of its missions but in the honest admission that the entire premise was fantasy, a national wish projected onto celluloid. Then came Dhurandhar. Where Baby had whispered and Phantom had wished, Dhurandhar roared. The Ranveer Singh blockbuster did not merely acknowledge covert operations or fantasize about revenge. It celebrated the act of killing with a visceral cinematic energy that turned targeted assassinations into crowd-pleasing spectacle, complete with a soundtrack that could fill stadiums.

These three films did not plan to form a trilogy. Neeraj Pandey, Kabir Khan, and the team behind Dhurandhar worked independently, with different creative visions, different production houses, and different stars. Yet placed side by side, the three films trace an unmistakable arc in India’s relationship with state violence. Baby revealed. Phantom yearned. Dhurandhar celebrated. The progression was not accidental. It was the cinematic expression of a nation whose patience with diplomatic restraint had been exhausted by decades of cross-border terrorism, and whose appetite for retribution grew with every attack that went unanswered. Understanding how these three films differ, and why each found the audience it did when it did, is essential to understanding how Indian popular culture prepared the ground for the real shadow war that would follow.

The chronological fact that all three films arrived before the shadow war became publicly visible is not a coincidence. It is a diagnostic. Cultural preparation precedes political action in democracies, because democratic governments, however covert their operations, require some form of public legitimacy to sustain policies over time. A covert campaign that the public discovers and recoils from is politically unsustainable. A covert campaign that the public discovers and celebrates is politically invulnerable. Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar, without intending to and without coordination, constructed the cultural conditions for the second scenario rather than the first. When the shadow war became visible, India celebrated rather than recoiled, and the celebration used the vocabulary, the emotional register, and the moral framework that three Bollywood films had provided.

The analysis that follows is not a film review. It is a strategic culture assessment conducted through the lens of three commercial entertainments that collectively reveal more about India’s evolving counter-terror psyche than any policy white paper or parliamentary debate. Each film will be examined not only for what it depicted on screen but for what its commercial reception reveals about the audience’s readiness to accept increasingly aggressive portrayals of state violence. The six-dimension comparison matrix that anchors this analysis, covering protagonist moral framework, depiction of violence, state endorsement level, emotional register, operational accuracy, and audience response, demonstrates that the escalation across these three films was not merely tonal. It was structural, ideological, and irreversible.

The Film’s Version

Baby: The Revelation of the Covert World

Neeraj Pandey’s Baby, released on January 23, 2015, introduced mainstream Indian audiences to a concept that had existed in whispers and occasional news reports but had never been given cinematic form with this level of operational specificity: the idea that India runs a dedicated, elite counter-intelligence unit whose members operate under false identities, travel across international borders, and execute missions that the government will deny any knowledge of if the operatives are caught. The film’s protagonist, Ajay Singh Rajput (played by Akshay Kumar), is not a traditional Bollywood hero defined by romantic entanglements or family drama. He is a professional whose defining characteristic is competence. Pandey’s screenplay strips away nearly everything that Bollywood audiences had been trained to expect from an action thriller. There is no extended romantic subplot. There are no item numbers inserted for commercial insurance. The songs serve the narrative rather than interrupting it. The result is something that felt genuinely novel in Hindi cinema: a spy thriller that took its own premise seriously enough to treat espionage as work rather than adventure.

The operational specifics of Baby are revealing in their restraint. When Ajay’s team conducts a raid on a mall in Greater Noida to capture a suspect, the sequence is choreographed with the precision of a tactical exercise, not a dance. The team communicates through earpieces. They coordinate entries and exits. They account for civilian presence. When the operation moves to Istanbul for a chase sequence, the filmmaking style borrows more from Paul Greengrass than from Rohit Shetty. The handheld camera work, the ambient sound design, and the refusal to deploy slow-motion heroics all contribute to a tonal register that says: this is how professionals work. The audience is not invited to cheer. They are invited to observe, to witness, and implicitly to approve of, a world that operates beneath the surface of democratic politics.

Pandey’s approach to violence in Baby is notably careful. The film contains violence, including gunfights, hand-to-hand combat, and a climactic desert sequence that involves significant firepower. But the violence is functional. It serves the mission. There is no lingering on wounds, no glorification of the kill, no moments where the camera asks the audience to savor the death of an adversary. When Ajay and his team eliminate threats, they do so with the emotional temperature of surgeons removing tumors. The violence is necessary, unpleasant, and over quickly. This restraint was not a limitation of the filmmakers’ imagination. It was a deliberate tonal choice that served Baby’s central argument: covert operations exist, they are staffed by professionals who sacrifice normal lives for national security, and the appropriate response from the citizenry is gratitude, not celebration.

The institutional framework Baby constructs is equally deliberate. The covert unit is presented as a creation of the Indian government, sanctioned at the highest levels, but deliberately insulated from political interference. The unit’s members are selected from the best of the armed forces and paramilitary, and they operate under the understanding that failure means disavowal. Pandey invests significant screen time in establishing the human cost of this arrangement. Ajay’s wife does not know what he does. His colleagues die and are buried without public acknowledgment. The film’s emotional core is not the thrill of the mission but the loneliness of the operative, the weight of serving a country that can never be told what you did for it. This framing serves a specific ideological function. By foregrounding sacrifice and professionalism, Baby makes the covert world sympathetic before it asks the audience to accept the covert world’s methods. The revelation comes wrapped in respect, and the respect makes the revelation palatable.

Pandey’s handling of the antagonist in Baby also warrants attention because it establishes a template that the subsequent films would modify. Baby does not demonize its primary threat through ethnic or religious caricature. Instead, the antagonist is presented as a competent adversary, a professional in his own right, whose operational capabilities demand respect even as his goals demand opposition. This decision was commercially risky for a Bollywood film operating in a genre where clear moral binaries typically drive audience engagement. By refusing to flatten the adversary into a cartoon villain, Pandey elevated Baby above its genre peers and signaled to audiences that the film respected their capacity to engage with nuance. Critically, this nuanced approach to the antagonist also strengthened Baby’s central argument about institutional competence. If the threat is serious, then the response must be proportionally serious, and the operatives who deliver that response deserve proportional respect. A lesser adversary would have diminished the operative. By making the threat credible, Baby made the sacrifice credible.

Akshay Kumar’s performance as Ajay warrants particular attention because it established the archetype that Phantom and Dhurandhar would subsequently modify. Kumar brought to the role a physical authority derived from years of action filmography, but he deployed that authority with uncharacteristic restraint. Ajay does not quip. He does not posture. He does not deliver the kind of one-liner that Kumar’s commercial filmography had conditioned audiences to expect. Kumar’s Ajay is defined by what he does not say, by the emotions he does not express, by the celebrations he does not participate in. Pandey reportedly worked with Kumar to strip away the star persona and find the character underneath, and the result is a performance that achieves something rare in Bollywood action cinema: it makes competence compelling without making it entertaining. Kumar’s Ajay is not fun to watch. He is important to watch. The distinction defines Baby’s relationship with its audience and distinguishes it categorically from both Phantom and Dhurandhar.

Baby’s box office performance provides the first data point in the commercial arc these three films trace. The film collected approximately 95 crore rupees domestically against a production budget of roughly 60 crore (with an additional 15 crore for prints and advertising). These numbers made Baby a commercial success, not a blockbuster by Bollywood’s increasingly inflated standards, but a strong performer that proved a market existed for a spy thriller that refused to compromise on tone. The audience that turned out for Baby was predominantly urban, multiplex-going, and educated, exactly the demographic that consumes English-language international news and had been following, with growing frustration, the Indian government’s seeming inability to hold Pakistan accountable for cross-border terrorism. Baby did not create this frustration. It validated it. And in validating it, it opened the door for what would come next.

Phantom: The Fantasy of Revenge

Phantom arrived seven months after Baby, on August 28, 2015, and immediately declared itself a different kind of film by broadcasting what Baby had carefully concealed: emotional investment in revenge. Where Baby had been clinical, Phantom was cathartic. Where Baby had asked audiences to appreciate the mechanics of covert work, Phantom asked audiences to feel the satisfaction of targeted killing. The difference is fundamental. Baby’s question was “Did you know this world exists?” Phantom’s question was “Don’t you wish this had actually happened?”

Kabir Khan’s film, based on Hussain Zaidi’s novel Mumbai Avengers, takes as its premise the most emotionally charged event in modern Indian history: the 26/11 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people over four days. The screenplay constructs a fictional scenario in which a disgraced army officer named Captain Daniyal Khan (Saif Ali Khan) is recruited by RAW, India’s foreign intelligence agency, for a ghost mission to eliminate the masterminds behind the attacks. The targets are thinly fictionalized versions of real people: characters based on Sajid Mir, David Coleman Headley, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi (renamed Sabahuddin Umvi), and Hafiz Saeed (renamed Haaris Saeed). The film does not pretend these connections are subtle. Phantom wants the audience to know exactly who is being killed, and exactly why.

The emotional architecture of Phantom is constructed with a precision that its somewhat uneven screenplay does not always match. Daniyal Khan is presented as a man with nothing left to lose, a soldier court-martialed for a judgment call in combat, estranged from his military father, and living a diminished life under a false identity. His recruitment by RAW offers not just a mission but redemption. The personal stakes are layered over the national ones: India wants revenge for Mumbai, and Daniyal wants to prove he is still the soldier his father raised. This dual motivation is Phantom’s central dramatic engine, and it ensures that every assassination in the film carries both political and personal satisfaction for the audience. When a target dies, India is avenged and Daniyal is redeemed simultaneously.

Khan’s depiction of violence in Phantom occupies a midpoint between Baby’s surgical restraint and the celebration that Dhurandhar would later introduce. Phantom’s kills are inventive, sometimes darkly humorous, and always satisfying within the logic of revenge fantasy. One target is eliminated via a rigged microphone at a political rally. Another is killed through a manipulated gas stove in a London flat. A third is neutralized in a war zone in Syria where his death can be attributed to the surrounding chaos. These methods are more theatrical than Baby’s, more self-consciously cinematic, and they invite a different kind of audience engagement. Where Baby’s audience observed, Phantom’s audience participated. The filmmaking positions the viewer as a co-conspirator in the fantasy, someone who shares Daniyal’s mission and shares in the satisfaction of each successful kill. The tagline “A story you wish were true” is not a marketing gimmick. It is an accurate description of the audience contract the film establishes.

Phantom’s treatment of the moral dimension is its most revealing feature. Kabir Khan, who had explored Indo-Pakistani relationships in both Ek Tha Tiger and would later explore them in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, is not naive about the human cost of revenge. The film gives Daniyal moments of doubt. The presence of Nawaz Mistry (Katrina Kaif), a RAW handler who provides intelligence support, introduces a female perspective that occasionally questions the mission’s trajectory. The screenplay acknowledges that the people being killed have families, that Pakistan as a whole is not the enemy, and that the line between justice and murder depends on which side of the border you stand on. But these acknowledgments are gestures, not arguments. They exist to demonstrate that the filmmakers have thought about the moral complexity, not to actually complicate the audience’s satisfaction in the revenge. The moral cost is noted, not felt. The distinction matters enormously.

Phantom’s commercial performance and critical reception add nuance to the trilogy’s arc. The film earned approximately 53 to 84 crore rupees domestically (depending on the source), significantly less than Baby despite higher star power, a bigger budget of approximately 72 crore, and the emotionally potent 26/11 connection. Critical reviews were mixed, with multiple major critics praising the premise and patriotic energy but noting uneven execution, pacing problems, and performances that did not fully commit to the material’s darker implications. The critical reception is less interesting than the audience reception. Phantom found its strongest support among viewers who responded to the revenge fantasy itself, who were less concerned with cinematic craft than with the emotional experience of seeing the 26/11 masterminds punished on screen. The film was banned in Pakistan, a development that became its own marketing event and confirmed that Phantom had touched a nerve that transcended cinematic evaluation.

The Pakistan ban deserves analysis because it reveals how seriously Pakistan’s cultural authorities took the film’s political content. The Lahore High Court issued the ban after Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the organization linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, filed a petition arguing that the film defamed Hafiz Saeed (depicted as Haaris Saeed in the film). The legal action confirmed something the filmmakers had intended but perhaps not fully anticipated: Phantom was not just entertainment. It was a political act. By naming its targets so transparently, Phantom forced a confrontation between Indian cinematic fantasy and Pakistani political reality. The ban gave Phantom a significance that its box office numbers alone would not have conferred. It demonstrated that a Bollywood film could function as a cultural weapon in the India-Pakistan information war, a lesson that would be applied with devastating effectiveness when Dhurandhar arrived.

Saif Ali Khan’s performance as Daniyal merits analysis because it occupies a tonal space between Kumar’s stoicism in Baby and Singh’s charisma in Dhurandhar. Khan brings an aristocratic weariness to the role, the bearing of a man who was born to privilege and military honor but has been stripped of both. His Daniyal is not a natural born operative; he is a soldier repurposed, his combat training redirected from conventional warfare to assassination. This repurposing is visible in Khan’s physicality: he fights with the controlled aggression of military training rather than the improvisational creativity of an intelligence professional. The performance grounds Phantom’s fantasy in a recognizable human reality. Daniyal is not a superhero. He is a damaged soldier given one chance to repair the damage, and the audience roots for his redemption as much as for the mission’s success. Khan’s quieter register meant that Phantom’s emotional energy came from the premise (revenge for 26/11) rather than from the protagonist’s personal magnetism, a structural dependency that distinguished the film from both Baby’s institutional authority and Dhurandhar’s star-driven charisma.

Katrina Kaif’s Nawaz Mistry, the RAW handler who provides intelligence support and occasionally participates in field operations, represents Phantom’s most interesting departure from conventional Bollywood gender dynamics in the spy genre. Nawaz is not a romantic interest. She is a professional whose competence is presented without sexualization and whose contribution to the mission is operational rather than decorative. Kabir Khan’s decision to frame the Daniyal-Nawaz relationship as professional partnership rather than romantic chemistry was a creative choice that reinforced Phantom’s claim to seriousness. Yet the decision also limited the film’s commercial appeal, removing the romantic subplot that Bollywood audiences traditionally use as emotional anchoring. Phantom sacrificed a commercial insurance policy for tonal integrity, and the sacrifice is visible in the film’s lower-than-expected box office performance.

Dhurandhar: The Celebration of the Kill

Dhurandhar completed the arc that Baby and Phantom had traced with the inevitability of a mathematical proof. If Baby revealed the covert world and Phantom wished for revenge, Dhurandhar turned the wish into a celebration. The Ranveer Singh blockbuster arrived at a moment when India’s patience with restraint had been tested to its breaking point by the Pahalgam massacre, the 26/11 wound that had never fully healed, and the persistent reports of terrorists living freely in Pakistani cities under state protection. Dhurandhar did not ask whether India should kill terrorists on foreign soil. It assumed the killing was already happening and transformed it into spectacle.

The film’s complete analysis reveals a narrative structure fundamentally different from both predecessors. Where Baby built tension through procedural detail and Phantom through revenge anticipation, Dhurandhar generates energy through triumphalism. The protagonist is not haunted by the moral weight of his actions. He is energized by them. The kills are not surgical necessities or cathartic fantasies. They are achievements to be savored, set pieces designed to generate audience applause. The soundtrack does not underscore quiet professionalism or brooding revenge. It celebrates, with compositions that would subsequently be played at political rallies and cricket matches, fusing entertainment, nationalism, and violence into a single cultural product.

Ranveer Singh’s performance anchors Dhurandhar’s tonal departure from its predecessors. Akshay Kumar played Ajay in Baby with a stoic professionalism that kept the character at arm’s length from the audience. Saif Ali Khan’s Daniyal in Phantom was emotionally accessible but dramatically confined by the revenge premise. Singh’s protagonist in Dhurandhar is neither stoic nor confined. He is charismatic, physically commanding, and emotionally available in a way that makes the audience identify with him completely. When he kills, the audience kills with him. When he celebrates, the audience celebrates. The performance does not create distance between the viewer and the violence. It eliminates distance entirely. This is Dhurandhar’s most significant departure from Baby and Phantom, and it is the departure that made Dhurandhar a cultural phenomenon rather than merely a commercial success.

The commercial data confirms the escalation. Dhurandhar’s box office performance dwarfed both predecessors, establishing it as one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of its release year. The audience that showed up was not limited to the urban multiplex demographic that had driven Baby’s success. Dhurandhar reached mass audiences in single-screen theaters, small-town India, and international markets with significant Indian diaspora populations. The breadth of the audience matters analytically because it demonstrates that the appetite for triumphalist counter-terror cinema was not confined to the elite segments that consume international news and strategic analysis. The appetite was national, cross-class, and intense. India did not merely accept Dhurandhar’s celebration of killing. India demanded it.

Dhurandhar’s production values and cinematic ambition also mark a departure from both predecessors that deserves attention. Baby was made on a moderate budget of approximately 60 crore rupees, and its visual style reflected that economy: handheld cameras, naturalistic lighting, and minimal CGI. Phantom operated on a larger budget of approximately 72 crore, and its production design included international location shooting in London, Vancouver, and Istanbul. Dhurandhar surpassed both, deploying production resources that placed the film in competition not with other Bollywood thrillers but with mainstream Bollywood tentpole entertainments. Action choreography, visual effects, sound design, and marketing all operated at a scale that communicated to audiences that the covert world was no longer a niche subject for discerning viewers. It was mainstream entertainment, worthy of the same production investment as Bollywood’s biggest romance or comedy franchises. Elevating the spy genre to tentpole status required treating state violence not as a topic requiring serious contemplation (Baby’s approach) or cathartic fantasy (Phantom’s approach) but as spectacle worthy of the biggest possible audience. Spectacle demands celebration, and celebration is precisely what Dhurandhar delivered.

Singh’s physicality transformed the spy genre’s visual language in ways that neither Kumar nor Khan had achieved. Kumar’s Ajay was a middle-aged professional whose physical capability was suggested rather than displayed; he moved through the film with the economy of a man who has been trained to conserve energy. Khan’s Daniyal was a soldier whose physicality was derived from military discipline. Singh’s protagonist was something altogether different: a physical force whose body communicated aggression, confidence, and the capacity for violence at a primal level that bypassed intellectual engagement. When Singh’s character entered a scene, the audience’s response was visceral before it was cognitive. His body spoke a language of dominance that Baby’s protagonist would have found undisciplined and Phantom’s protagonist would have found unnecessary. In Dhurandhar’s world, that dominance was the point. Covert capability is not something to be hidden or apologized for. It is something to be displayed, celebrated, and inhabited with total physical commitment.

The Reality

India’s documented campaign of targeted killings exists in the factual record, whatever debates may surround attribution and authorization. Militants linked to designated terror organizations began dying on Pakistani soil in circumstances that followed a recognizable pattern: motorcycle-borne assailants, specific geographic clustering in cities known to house terror infrastructure, targets who appeared on India’s designated-terrorist lists or NIA charge sheets, and a refusal by any organization to claim responsibility. By the time the pattern became undeniable, the three films that had prepared India’s cultural response to such operations were already embedded in the national consciousness. Baby had provided the institutional vocabulary. Phantom had provided the emotional precedent. Dhurandhar had provided the celebratory framework. India’s cultural infrastructure for processing covert killing was complete before the killing was confirmed.

Against this operational reality, each film captures a fragment of the truth that the others miss. Baby’s depiction of a professional, institutional, and disciplined covert apparatus is probably the closest to the organizational reality. The real campaign, if the prevailing analysis is correct, was not the work of lone agents or disgraced soldiers seeking redemption. It was the product of institutional capability development over years, involving intelligence gathering, asset cultivation, surveillance infrastructure, and operational planning that required sustained institutional commitment. Baby’s vision of a dedicated unit operating with government sanction and professional discipline captures the bureaucratic reality that Phantom and Dhurandhar, in their different ways, romanticize away.

Phantom’s fantasy of targeting the specific masterminds of a specific attack resonates with one dimension of the real campaign: the target-list approach. The real shadow war has, by all available evidence, operated from a list. The targets have not been random militants. They have been individuals who appear on India’s designated-terrorist lists, who were named in NIA charge sheets, or who were linked to specific attacks against Indian interests. This selectivity, this sense of a curated kill list being worked through methodically, echoes Phantom’s premise of hunting specific 26/11 masterminds. The difference is that Phantom concentrated the entire campaign into a single dramatic mission, while the real campaign has unfolded over years with dozens of targets across multiple cities and organizations.

Dhurandhar’s triumphalist tone, paradoxically, may be the most honest reflection of Indian public sentiment, if not operational reality. The real shadow war, whatever its actual mechanics, has been received by the Indian public with precisely the kind of celebration that Dhurandhar depicts. When Indian media reports a targeted killing with the phrase “Dhurandhar-style,” when social media erupts in celebration each time a designated terrorist is reported dead in Karachi or Lahore, when political figures invoke the shadow war as evidence of India’s new strategic posture, the public response mirrors Dhurandhar’s emotional register exactly. The film versus reality comparison reveals that Dhurandhar did not predict the public response to the shadow war. It created the vocabulary for that response. Indian society uses a framework furnished by a Bollywood blockbuster to process real political violence.

Documented operations occupy a space that none of the three films adequately represents. Recorded killings are quieter than Baby’s action sequences, more methodical than Phantom’s globe-trotting missions, and more lethal than Dhurandhar’s theatrical set pieces. A motorcycle pulls alongside a target on a residential street. Shots are fired. The motorcycle disappears. There is no chase, no combat, no dramatic confrontation. What defines the real shadow war is its efficiency and its economy of violence, two qualities that make for poor cinema but exceptional covert doctrine. India’s geographic distribution of these operations, spanning Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and smaller cities across Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces, suggests a scope that exceeds anything the three films individually imagined. Baby set one operation against one threat. Phantom sent one operative against four targets. Dhurandhar dramatized a concentrated campaign. Reality, by the available evidence, encompasses dozens of operations across years, conducted by an apparatus sophisticated enough to maintain operational security across an entire hostile country.

India’s three spy films dressed up a campaign of precise, unglamorous killing in the emotional clothing each era’s audience required. Baby clothed it in professionalism. Phantom clothed it in catharsis. Dhurandhar clothed it in glory. None of the three captured the operational reality in its totality, but collectively they created a public understanding of covert action that, however inaccurate in its specifics, served the cultural function of preparing a democratic population to accept, support, and celebrate what their government was allegedly doing in their name.

Where Film and Reality Converge

The convergence between these three films and the real shadow war is not incidental. It reflects the fact that all three filmmakers, working independently, were drawing on the same body of open-source intelligence, the same public frustration, and the same cultural trajectory. The convergence operates across the six dimensions that constitute the three-film narrative posture comparison matrix, the analytical artifact this analysis produces.

Dimension One: Protagonist Moral Framework

Baby’s Ajay operates within a moral framework defined by duty. His actions are justified not because they are morally righteous in the abstract but because they serve a nation that is under threat. Ajay does not enjoy killing. He does it because someone must. His moral framework is essentially consequentialist: the outcomes (national security, lives saved) justify the means (covert violence, deception, operating outside legal frameworks). This is the moral framework of the professional intelligence operative, and it converges with reality in important ways. The real shadow war, if it operates as analysts believe, is justified by its architects not as moral crusade but as strategic necessity. The counter-terror doctrine that has evolved over multiple phases positions covert action as the least bad option available to a state facing persistent cross-border terrorism that diplomatic channels have failed to address.

Phantom’s Daniyal operates within a moral framework defined by justice. His mission is explicitly framed as corrective action: the 26/11 masterminds walk free, and someone must hold them accountable. This framework is essentially retributive, organized around the principle that specific wrongs demand specific punishments. Daniyal’s moral authority derives not from institutional sanction (though he has it) but from the moral clarity of the 26/11 victims’ demand for justice. This framework converges with reality through the target-list approach: the real campaign’s selectivity, its focus on individuals linked to specific attacks, suggests a retributive logic that mirrors Phantom’s. The men being targeted in Pakistani cities are not random militants. They are individuals whose names appear on charge sheets connected to specific attacks that killed specific people. The real campaign’s precision suggests a moral architecture closer to Phantom’s justice model than to Baby’s utilitarian calculus.

Dhurandhar’s protagonist operates within a moral framework defined by righteous aggression. There is no hand-wringing about whether killing is justified. There is no careful consequentialist calculation about costs and benefits. The moral framework is primal and unambiguous: these people threatened India, and India has the right, the capability, and the will to destroy them. This framework converges with reality not through operational mechanics but through public reception. Indian public discourse about the shadow war operates overwhelmingly within Dhurandhar’s moral framework. Social media commentary, cable news discussion, and political rhetoric about the targeted killings rarely engage with Baby’s consequentialist calculus or Phantom’s retributive precision. They celebrate in the register Dhurandhar established: righteous, unapologetic, and triumphant. The convergence between Dhurandhar’s moral framework and public reality is the most analytically important convergence in the entire comparison, because it suggests that the film did not merely reflect Indian attitudes. It shaped them.

Dimension Two: Depiction of Violence

The escalation of violence across the three films tracks a progression from functional to cathartic to spectacular. Baby’s violence is functional: it serves the mission and carries the emotional temperature of professional necessity. Phantom’s violence is cathartic: it provides release for accumulated rage over 26/11 and carries the emotional temperature of justified vengeance. Dhurandhar’s violence is spectacular: it exists to generate audience pleasure and carries the emotional temperature of a victory celebration. The real shadow war’s violence is none of these things. It is cold, fast, and unremarkable in its execution. Motorcycle. Gunshot. Departure. The divergence between cinematic and real violence is expected; no filmmaker can dramatize operational tedium. What converges is the audience’s trajectory: the Indian public’s willingness to accept increasingly aggressive cinematic violence mirrored its willingness to accept real violence when the shadow war emerged into public consciousness.

Dimension Three: State Endorsement Level

Baby received critical acclaim and strong word-of-mouth but no explicit government endorsement. Its relationship with the Indian state was one of plausible alignment: the film’s worldview was consistent with the government’s counter-terror posture, but no official connection was established or claimed. Phantom’s relationship with the state was more politically charged. The Pakistan ban generated diplomatic friction, and the film’s transparent depiction of 26/11 masterminds positioned it within the India-Pakistan information war whether its makers intended this or not. Dhurandhar’s relationship with the Indian state became the subject of sustained debate. The film received a National Film Award. Government officials referenced it in public statements. Political figures used Dhurandhar’s imagery and language in their own communications about national security. Whether this constituted formal endorsement or merely reflected the film’s cultural penetration is the subject of the nationalism debate that has animated cultural criticism of the film.

The progression is unmistakable: from plausible alignment (Baby) to inadvertent political significance (Phantom) to debated formal endorsement (Dhurandhar). Each step represented an escalation in the relationship between Bollywood spy cinema and the Indian state, and each step made the next step easier. Dhurandhar’s cultural dominance would have been impossible without Baby’s normalization of the covert world and Phantom’s demonstration that revenge fantasy could function as political statement.

Dimension Four: Emotional Register

Baby’s emotional register is tension. The audience’s primary experience is anxiety: will the mission succeed? Will the operatives survive? Will the threat be neutralized? The emotional payoff is relief. Pandey constructs his set pieces to maximize uncertainty, withholding information from the audience about outcomes until the latest possible moment. The mall raid sequence in Baby generates its emotional power not from spectacle but from the possibility of failure, a possibility that Dhurandhar never entertains. Baby’s audience leaves the theater with a sense of having witnessed something serious, something that cost something. That cost is the source of the emotional resonance. Relief is only possible after genuine anxiety, and genuine anxiety requires genuine stakes. Pandey understood this transaction intuitively.

Phantom’s emotional register is satisfaction. The audience’s primary experience is anticipation: when will the next target die? How will it happen? The emotional payoff is catharsis, the release of rage that had been accumulating since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks killed 166 people, an event that was recent enough in the public memory to generate powerful emotional identification. Kabir Khan calibrates each kill sequence in Phantom to maximize the anticipatory pleasure: the audience knows the target is going to die, the question is merely how and when. This structure is borrowed from revenge-narrative cinema worldwide, from Hitchcockian suspense to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and Khan deploys it with professional competence if not always with consistent energy. Phantom’s satisfaction is more emotionally nutritious than Baby’s relief because it addresses a specific grievance rather than a generalized threat. When a 26/11 mastermind dies on screen, the audience is not merely relieved that a threat has been neutralized. The audience feels that justice, however fictional, has been served. Justice is a more sustaining emotion than relief, and Phantom’s emotional register builds on Baby’s precisely because satisfaction requires the foundation of awareness that Baby provided.

Dhurandhar’s emotional register is euphoria. The audience’s primary experience is exhilaration: the kills are spectacular, the protagonist is triumphant, and the audience is invited to share in the triumph without reservation or qualification. Dhurandhar’s emotional architecture is constructed to eliminate any space between the audience and the protagonist’s experience. There is no ironic distance, no reflective pause, no moment where the camera asks the audience to consider what they are celebrating. Euphoria is designed to overwhelm cognitive processing, to bypass the analytical faculties that might generate doubt or moral discomfort, and to produce an experience of pure collective joy. Dhurandhar achieves this through a combination of cinematic techniques (editing rhythm, soundtrack deployment, performance energy) that are individually unremarkable but collectively devastating in their emotional impact.

The progression from tension to satisfaction to euphoria is not merely a cinematic observation. It is a diagnostic of India’s changing relationship with state violence. Tension assumes the outcome is uncertain and the violence is risky. Satisfaction assumes the violence is justified but acknowledges its weight. Euphoria assumes the violence is not only justified but glorious, and any weight associated with it is lifted by the righteousness of the cause. The Indian public’s journey through these three emotional registers, from anxious acceptance in 2015 to unqualified celebration by Dhurandhar’s release, prepared the cultural ground for a shadow war that the public would greet not with ambivalence but with applause.

Dimension Five: Operational Accuracy

Baby is the most operationally credible of the three films. Neeraj Pandey’s background in research-heavy filmmaking (Special 26 was meticulously researched for procedural accuracy) resulted in a film that intelligence professionals have, by multiple accounts, praised for getting the institutional texture right. The covert unit’s structure, the communication protocols, the operational tempo, and the insulation from political interference all correspond to credible descriptions of how such units might actually function. The film’s accuracy is not perfect; the action sequences still conform to Bollywood conventions that prioritize dramatic impact over tactical precision. But the underlying institutional portrait is plausible.

Phantom is operationally creative but operationally implausible. The film’s kills are inventive (rigged microphones, manipulated gas stoves, war-zone opportunism) but strain credibility. The idea that a single operative and a single handler could traverse Chicago, London, Syria, and Pakistan, eliminating high-value targets with improvised methods and no support infrastructure, is fantasy. The film knows this and does not pretend otherwise. Phantom’s operational inaccuracy is not a flaw. It is a feature. The film is explicitly a wish, and wishes are not constrained by operational reality. But the gap between Phantom’s flamboyant kills and the real shadow war’s motorcycle executions is the widest in the trilogy.

Dhurandhar occupies a middle ground that is paradoxically the most unsettling. The film’s depictions of covert operations, while dramatized for cinematic effect, contain operational details that correspond in disturbing ways to documented real operations. The motorcycle scenes, the urban settings, the targeting of individuals in routine daily activities, and the geographic specificity of the missions all parallel the documented pattern of the real campaign. Whether this convergence reflects insider knowledge, careful open-source research by the filmmakers, or coincidental alignment between cinematic imagination and operational reality is a question that the C-series analysis addresses directly. What is clear is that Dhurandhar’s operational depictions feel less like fantasy than either of its predecessors, a convergence that has contributed to the pervasive media habit of labeling real killings “Dhurandhar-style.”

Beyond the six formal dimensions of comparison, the three films converge on a structural feature that merits separate analysis: the relationship between protagonist and institution. In Baby, the protagonist serves the institution. Ajay is an operative who derives his authority from the covert unit, and the unit derives its authority from the state. The chain of authority is clear and hierarchical. In Phantom, the protagonist and the institution are interdependent. Daniyal needs RAW for the mission, and RAW needs Daniyal for his unique combination of skills and expendability. The relationship is transactional rather than hierarchical. In Dhurandhar, the protagonist transcends the institution. Singh’s character becomes the embodiment of India’s covert capability, a larger-than-life figure whose personal charisma overshadows the institutional machinery behind him. This progression from servant to partner to embodiment tracks a broader cultural development in how India relates to its security apparatus. In the Baby era, citizens respected the institution. In the Phantom era, citizens partnered with the institution through emotional investment. In the Dhurandhar era, citizens identify with the institution through a single charismatic figure, conflating national capability with personal heroism. This conflation is dangerous in a democratic context because it personalizes what should be institutional, but it is commercially irresistible because personal identification generates stronger audience engagement than institutional respect.

Dimension Six: Audience Response

Baby was received with respect. Critics praised the film’s restraint, its refusal to pander, and its treatment of espionage as serious subject matter. The audience responded with appreciation rather than fervor. Baby did not generate the kind of cultural event that transcends cinema. It was a good film that performed well and was remembered as the first serious Indian spy thriller.

Phantom was received with division. Critics were split between those who praised the film’s emotional honesty (the wish-fulfillment premise was seen as refreshingly transparent) and those who criticized its uneven execution. The audience responded with more intensity than the critics, particularly in the sections of Indian society that carried the strongest emotional connection to 26/11. Phantom generated political controversy through the Pakistan ban, which elevated its cultural significance beyond what its box office alone would have justified. But Phantom did not become a cultural phenomenon. It remained a film with a powerful premise and imperfect execution.

Dhurandhar was received with cultural detonation. The film did not merely perform well at the box office. It became a vocabulary, a reference point, a meme, a rallying cry, and a national mood. The audience response to Dhurandhar was qualitatively different from the response to Baby or Phantom because it transcended the cinema-going experience. Dhurandhar’s imagery was adopted by media outlets to describe real events. Its soundtrack was played at political functions. Its protagonist became the face of India’s covert capabilities in the public imagination. No Bollywood film in recent memory has achieved this level of cultural penetration on a national security topic, and the penetration was made possible precisely because Baby and Phantom had prepared the audience for each successive escalation.

Where Film and Reality Diverge

The divergences between these three films and reality are as analytically revealing as the convergences, and the divergences between the films themselves illuminate the ideological journey India has traveled.

The Absent Moral Cost

The single most significant divergence between all three films and the real shadow war is the treatment of moral cost. Baby comes closest to acknowledging moral complexity: Ajay’s isolation, the deaths of team members, and the institutional loneliness of the covert operative all gesture toward a price that is paid for covert action. But even Baby’s gestures are limited. The moral cost in Baby is personal (the operative’s sacrifice) rather than structural (the implications of a democratic state conducting extrajudicial killings). Phantom gestures toward moral cost through Daniyal’s internal conflict and the screenplay’s occasional acknowledgment that the targets are human beings embedded in communities. But these gestures are decorative rather than structural. They exist to demonstrate the filmmakers’ thoughtfulness, not to genuinely complicate the audience’s experience.

Dhurandhar discards the pretense of moral engagement entirely. The protagonist does not struggle with the implications of killing. The screenplay does not pause to acknowledge the dead as anything other than enemies who deserved their fate. The audience is not asked to sit with any discomfort. The result is a film that presents targeted killing as an unambiguous good, which is precisely why it resonated so powerfully with an Indian public that was exhausted by decades of restrained response to cross-border terrorism. The absence of moral cost in Dhurandhar is not a creative failure. It is a creative choice that reflects and reinforces a specific public mood. No Bollywood film before Dhurandhar had attempted to present covert killing with zero moral weight and found an audience that embraced the absence rather than questioning it. The precedent is significant because it establishes that Indian audiences, by the time of Dhurandhar’s release, were ready to consume depictions of state violence without any accompanying moral framework. The demand for moral cost that Western cinema (Zero Dark Thirty, Munich, Eye in the Sky) builds into its counter-terror narratives is absent from India’s most commercially successful contribution to the genre.

The real shadow war, whatever moral calculus its architects may privately conduct, has been received by the Indian public with the same absence of moral engagement that Dhurandhar exhibits. This convergence between cinematic and public moral posture is the most important cultural development in the entire trilogy’s arc.

The comparison with Spielberg’s Munich, explored in depth in the Dhurandhar-Munich analysis, is instructive here. Munich depicted Israel’s post-Olympic massacre targeting campaign with intense moral anguish. Spielberg’s protagonist, Avner, is progressively destroyed by the work he does. The film argues that targeted killing, however justified, exacts a spiritual cost that cannot be separated from the tactical achievement. None of the three Indian films make this argument. Baby acknowledges personal cost. Phantom acknowledges tactical complexity. Dhurandhar acknowledges nothing. The progression from Baby’s personal-cost model through Phantom’s tactical-complexity model to Dhurandhar’s zero-cost model is the emotional journey India has traveled, and it represents a significant divergence from the moral-cost tradition that Western cinema has established for films about state-sponsored killing.

The Simplification of Pakistan

All three films simplify Pakistan in different but revealing ways. Baby presents Pakistan as a source of threats managed by competent professionals on both sides. The film does not demonize Pakistan as a whole; instead, it focuses narrowly on the threat actors and the Indian response. This is the least politically charged of the three depictions, and it reflects Pandey’s commitment to procedural realism over political messaging. When Pakistani characters appear in Baby, they function as operational elements of the threat environment rather than as representatives of a civilization. Baby’s Pakistan is operational, not ideological.

Phantom’s depiction of Pakistan is more emotionally loaded. The 26/11 connection ensures that Pakistan is present not as a generalized threat but as a specific, named adversary whose institutions (Lashkar-e-Taiba, depicted with transparent pseudonyms) bear responsibility for specific atrocities. Yet Kabir Khan, consistent with his broader filmography’s engagement with Indo-Pakistani relations, includes dialogue and scenes that distinguish between Pakistani terrorists and Pakistani civilians. Daniyal’s operations take him to locations where ordinary Pakistanis live ordinary lives, and the screenplay pauses, however briefly, to acknowledge that the targets are embedded in communities. Khan’s Pakistan is complicit at the institutional level but innocent at the civilian level, a distinction that reflects the actual complexity of the India-Pakistan relationship. The distinction is acknowledged rather than explored; Phantom does not have the narrative space to develop the civilian-Pakistan perspective fully. But the acknowledgment matters because it represents the last time in the trilogy that Pakistan’s complexity receives even a gesture of recognition.

Dhurandhar’s Pakistan is the most simplified and the most politically charged. The film’s geographic and institutional depictions position Pakistan as a landscape defined by the presence of terrorists, with civilian life serving as background rather than foreground. The distinction between the state, the military, the intelligence services, and the militant organizations, a distinction that is analytically essential to understanding the real shadow war, is collapsed in Dhurandhar into a single adversarial environment. This simplification is not unique to Indian cinema. Hollywood’s depictions of Middle Eastern countries in the War on Terror era exhibited identical flattening. But the simplification matters in the Indian context because Dhurandhar’s cultural influence is so pervasive that its simplified Pakistan has become the Pakistan that many Indian viewers carry in their imaginations.

The real shadow war operates in a Pakistan that is infinitely more complex than any of the three films depict. The relationship between Pakistan’s military, its intelligence services, and the militant organizations it has variously supported, managed, and occasionally fought, is one of the most complicated security relationships in the contemporary world. The broader genre evolution from victim to aggressor in Indian cinema has progressively simplified this complexity, and the trilogy of Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar is both a product and an accelerant of that simplification.

The Missing Institutional Debate

None of the three films engages with the institutional debate that the real shadow war has generated within India’s strategic community. The question of whether a democratic state should conduct extrajudicial killings on foreign soil, regardless of the targets’ culpability, is one of the most consequential strategic questions India faces. It involves legal questions (the compatibility of covert killing with India’s constitutional framework and its obligations under international law), ethical questions (whether the ends justify the means, and who decides), and strategic questions (whether the campaign’s benefits in deterrence and capability degradation outweigh its costs in international reputation and potential escalation). Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar, each in their own way, sidestep this debate entirely.

Baby sidesteps it by framing the covert world as an institutional given, something that exists and has always existed, requiring no justification. Pandey’s screenplay constructs a world in which the covert unit’s existence is not a policy choice but a structural feature of the security landscape, like the military itself. This framing forecloses debate by removing the covert world from the category of things that citizens might legitimately question. You do not debate whether the army should exist. Similarly, Baby suggests, you do not debate whether covert counter-terror units should exist. They simply do, and the only relevant question is whether the people staffing them are competent and patriotic.

Phantom sidesteps the institutional debate by anchoring the mission in the specific, overwhelming moral clarity of 26/11, making any institutional debate seem like legalistic quibbling in the face of 166 deaths. Kabir Khan’s screenplay presents the mission as emotionally mandatory rather than institutionally optional. The 26/11 victims demand justice. Justice requires targeting the masterminds. Targeting the masterminds requires covert action. Each link in the causal chain is presented as so morally obvious that questioning any link becomes an act of moral evasion. Phantom makes institutional debate feel like betrayal of the dead, a framing that is emotionally powerful but analytically dishonest.

Dhurandhar sidesteps the institutional debate by operating at an emotional register where debate itself is irrelevant. Audiences watching Dhurandhar are not in a cognitive state conducive to institutional analysis. They are cheering, celebrating, and participating in a communal experience of national triumph. Asking whether the shadow war is legally permissible or strategically wise in the middle of a Dhurandhar screening would be like asking about fire safety regulations during a fireworks display. The question is technically valid but experientially absurd. Dhurandhar achieves its ideological work not by winning the debate but by making the debate experientially impossible.

Collectively, the three sidestepping strategies construct a cultural environment in which the shadow war’s legitimacy is assumed, never argued for. This is perhaps the most significant cultural achievement of the three films collectively: they normalized covert action not by winning an argument but by making the argument unnecessary. Each film contributed a different normalization mechanism (Baby: institutional givenness; Phantom: moral clarity; Dhurandhar: emotional transcendence), and together they produced a comprehensive cultural infrastructure that insulates the shadow war from democratic scrutiny.

Different Directors, Different Visions, Same Trajectory

The complication that must be honestly addressed is that these three films were not created by a single intelligence service or cultural apparatus coordinating a propaganda campaign. They were made by different directors with genuinely different artistic sensibilities. Neeraj Pandey is a meticulous craftsman whose previous films (A Wednesday, Special 26) demonstrated a commitment to procedural realism and a respect for the intelligence of his audience. His directorial signature is restraint: the refusal to oversimplify, the willingness to let complexity breathe, the confidence that audiences will follow a story that does not insult them. Pandey’s Baby bears this signature in every frame.

Kabir Khan is an emotional filmmaker whose body of work (Ek Tha Tiger, Bajrangi Bhaijaan) consistently explores Indo-Pakistani relationships with nuance and, often, with sympathy for both sides. Khan began his career as a documentary filmmaker, and his documentarian’s instinct for human complexity persists in his narrative work. His Phantom reflects both his emotional ambition and his political awareness: the film wants to provide catharsis while acknowledging that catharsis has consequences. That the acknowledgment does not fully succeed as drama does not diminish its sincerity as intention.

The Dhurandhar team brought a different energy entirely, one rooted in Bollywood’s mainstream entertainment tradition and its capacity to transform any subject, including political violence, into crowd-pleasing spectacle. Where Pandey prioritized plausibility and Khan prioritized emotional honesty, Dhurandhar’s creative approach prioritized impact, understanding that maximum audience engagement requires maximum emotional intensity and that maximum emotional intensity requires the elimination of ambiguity. Ambiguity is the enemy of spectacle, and Dhurandhar’s creative team understood this with an intuition that produced the most commercially successful spy film in Indian cinema history.

The fact that three independent creative visions, operating without coordination, produced a trilogy of escalating aggression is itself the most powerful evidence for the thesis that these films reflect rather than manufacture India’s changing strategic culture. If a single production house had made all three films with a deliberate escalation plan, the progression could be dismissed as propaganda. That three independent teams, working with different stars, different studios, and different creative philosophies, arrived at progressively more aggressive depictions of covert violence suggests that the escalation was driven by audience demand rather than creative manipulation. The filmmakers read the cultural temperature accurately, and each read it slightly hotter than the last, because the cultural temperature was, in fact, rising.

This does not mean the films had no causal impact on public attitudes. The relationship between entertainment and public opinion is never purely reflective. Each film shaped the environment that the next film entered. Baby made the covert world visible. Phantom made revenge desirable. Dhurandhar made killing celebratory. Each film shifted the Overton window of what was culturally acceptable in Indian spy cinema, and by shifting the cinematic Overton window, each film contributed to shifting the political Overton window as well. The question of whether films lead or follow public opinion is not resolvable as a binary. They do both, simultaneously, in a feedback loop that the broader genre analysis traces across the full arc of Indian counter-terror cinema.

What the Comparison Reveals

The Escalation Was Structural, Not Tonal

The most important finding of the six-dimension comparison is that the escalation across Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar was not merely tonal. It would be tempting to describe the progression as three films that told the same story with increasing emotional intensity, like three performances of the same piece of music, each played louder than the last. This characterization would be misleading. The three films do not tell the same story. They tell three fundamentally different stories about the relationship between the Indian state, its covert capabilities, and its citizens.

Baby tells a story of institutional competence and individual sacrifice. Its implicit argument is that India’s security requires a covert world, that the covert world requires exceptional people, and that the appropriate public posture toward this world is informed gratitude. Phantom tells a story of righteous vengeance. Its implicit argument is that India has been victimized by specific actors, that those actors must be specifically punished, and that the appropriate public posture toward revenge is emotional satisfaction tempered by awareness of cost. Dhurandhar tells a story of national triumph. Its implicit argument is that India has transcended victimhood, that killing is not a necessary evil but a positive good, and that the appropriate public posture toward state violence is celebration.

These are not three versions of the same story told at different volumes. They are three different ideological propositions, each building on the previous one’s cultural work but arriving at a qualitatively different conclusion. The escalation is structural because each film reconstructs the relationship between citizen and state violence from the ground up. Baby’s citizen is a grateful beneficiary. Phantom’s citizen is an invested co-conspirator. Dhurandhar’s citizen is a triumphant participant. The transformation from beneficiary to co-conspirator to participant is the cultural precondition for popular acceptance of the shadow war, and the three films collectively accomplished that transformation.

The Audience Voted Before the Government Acted

The box office chronology reveals a pattern that should concern political scientists studying the relationship between popular culture and security policy. Baby’s moderate commercial success in January 2015 demonstrated a market for spy-thriller content. Phantom’s more ambitious commercial performance later that year demonstrated that the market could absorb revenge fantasy. Dhurandhar’s massive commercial success demonstrated that the market had an appetite not just for content about covert operations but for content that celebrated covert operations without moral qualification.

What the Commercial Data Actually Measures

Box office collections are not opinion polls. They do not ask respondents to choose between policy options or express preferences on a Likert scale. They measure something more fundamental: what experiences people will pay for. When hundreds of millions of rupees flow into theaters showing Baby, those ticket purchases measure willingness to spend time inside the covert world. When Phantom’s collections reflect the Pakistan ban’s amplifying effect, the numbers measure willingness to participate in a politically charged cultural event. When Dhurandhar’s collections break records, they measure willingness to celebrate killing. Each measurement captures a different dimension of India’s evolving counter-terror psyche, and the measurements, taken together, trace a trajectory that is more reliable than any survey instrument because it reflects revealed preference rather than stated preference.

Economists draw a sharp distinction between what people say they want (stated preference, vulnerable to social desirability bias) and what people demonstrate they want through their behavior (revealed preference, harder to fake). Applied to the Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar trilogy, this distinction illuminates a gap that opinion surveys would miss. An Indian citizen asked directly whether they support extrajudicial killing on foreign soil might hesitate, hedge, or express qualified support constrained by democratic norms. That same citizen, purchasing a Dhurandhar ticket and cheering in the theater during a kill sequence, reveals a preference that is unambiguous. Dhurandhar’s box office is a revealed preference measurement, and what it reveals is an Indian public whose comfort with state violence had escalated beyond anything that stated-preference instruments would capture.

This commercial progression preceded the documented escalation of the real shadow war. The targeted killings attributed to unknown gunmen began producing confirmed results several years after these films had already established their cultural dominance. The chronological relationship does not prove causation. The films did not order the shadow war into existence. But the films did create a cultural environment in which the shadow war, when it became visible, was received by the Indian public with the precise emotional register that Dhurandhar had established: triumphant, unapologetic, and hungry for more. The audience, in economic terms, voted for escalation with their ticket purchases. The government, whatever its actual decision-making process, implemented a policy that the audience had already endorsed in the marketplace of entertainment.

This is the finding that should animate analysis of the cinema-policy feedback loop. The detailed examination of how cinema shapes counter-terror policy traces the pathway from film release to audience reception to media framing to political exploitation to policy validation. The Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar trilogy is the clearest case study of this pathway in action, because the three films provide three data points along a single escalation curve, and the curve’s trajectory matches, with unsettling precision, the trajectory of real policy.

What Each Film Added to India’s Counter-Terror Self-Image

Baby added awareness. Before Baby, the Indian public’s understanding of covert counter-terror operations was fragmentary, derived from occasional news reports and general awareness that agencies like RAW existed. Baby gave the covert world a face, a structure, and a human dimension. After Baby, Indian audiences could visualize what a covert operative’s life looked like, could imagine the institutional framework within which such operatives worked, and could appreciate the personal sacrifices involved. This awareness was the foundation for everything that followed. You cannot celebrate what you cannot see, and Baby made the invisible visible.

Phantom added desire. After Baby had made the covert world visible, Phantom channeled the emotional energy that the visibility had generated into a specific demand: revenge for 26/11. Phantom’s contribution to India’s counter-terror self-image was the legitimation of the revenge impulse. Before Phantom, wanting India to kill the 26/11 masterminds was a private sentiment, expressed in living rooms and on social media but not culturally sanctioned in mainstream entertainment. After Phantom, the desire for revenge was out in the open, wrapped in cinematic respectability, and endorsed by the nation’s most powerful cultural industry. Phantom made it permissible to want what Baby had shown was possible. The cultural transaction was significant: an industry that had previously treated terrorism as a source of victimhood now treated it as a call to action, and audiences ratified the shift with their wallets.

Dhurandhar added pride. This is the most significant contribution of the three, because pride is self-sustaining in a way that awareness and desire are not. Awareness can fade as attention moves to other subjects. Desire can dissipate as time passes and emotions cool. Pride, once established, regenerates itself. Dhurandhar told India that covert killing was not something to be aware of or to wish for. It was something to be proud of. The shadow war was not an unfortunate necessity or a secret shame. It was a national achievement, evidence of India’s arrival as a power that could project force across borders and punish those who attacked it. This transformation of covert killing from necessary evil to national pride is Dhurandhar’s lasting contribution, and it is the reason that every subsequent targeted killing in Pakistan is processed by the Indian public through the emotional framework Dhurandhar established.

Pride functions differently from awareness and desire in democratic political systems. Awareness creates informed citizens who can evaluate policy. Desire creates motivated citizens who demand specific policy outcomes. Pride creates identified citizens who experience policy as personal achievement. When an Indian citizen feels pride in the shadow war, the campaign is no longer something the government does on their behalf. It is something they participate in through emotional identification. This participatory pride makes democratic opposition to the shadow war not merely unpopular but psychologically costly. To oppose a policy in which you feel pride requires rejecting a piece of your own identity, and identity-rejection is the most psychologically expensive form of political change available. Dhurandhar’s transformation of covert killing into a source of national pride therefore functions as a political lock: once pride is established, reversing the policy requires not just policy argument but identity reconstruction, and democratic publics almost never voluntarily reconstruct their identities around security issues.

The Trilogy That Nobody Planned

The analytical power of comparing these three films lies precisely in the fact that nobody planned them as a trilogy. A deliberate trilogy, created by a single production house with escalating aggression built into the creative brief, would be interesting as a cultural product but unremarkable as an analytical data point. It would tell us what the filmmakers intended, not what the culture demanded. The fact that three independent production systems, responding to the same cultural environment but without coordination, produced three films that trace a perfect escalation curve from awareness through desire to pride is evidence of something much more analytically significant than any planned trilogy could provide.

It is evidence that India’s strategic culture was changing from below. Not from the top down, through government policy statements or strategic white papers. Not from the outside in, through international pressure or diplomatic realignment. From below, through the aggregated preferences of hundreds of millions of citizens expressing their evolving relationship with state violence through the most powerful cultural channel available to them: the Bollywood box office. Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar are not propaganda in any traditional sense. They are market responses to market demand, and the market demanded escalation. The films’ commercial trajectories are the most honest polling data available on Indian public attitudes toward covert killing, more honest than opinion surveys (which are shaped by social desirability bias) and more granular than election results (which aggregate too many variables to isolate security preferences).

The trilogy reveals that the shadow war’s cultural infrastructure was in place before the shadow war’s operational infrastructure became visible. India was ready to celebrate targeted killings before there were targeted killings to celebrate. The films did not create the readiness. They registered it, amplified it, and gave it a vocabulary. When the real motorcycle assassinations began making headlines, India did not need to construct a new emotional framework to process them. Dhurandhar had already provided one. The cultural preparation was complete.

Did the Films Lead or Follow? A Final Adjudication

Resolving the named disagreement requires distinguishing between causal mechanisms at different levels of analysis. At the individual level, the films clearly followed. Neeraj Pandey did not invent the concept of covert counter-terror operations; he dramatized existing institutional reality. Kabir Khan did not manufacture the desire for 26/11 revenge; he channeled existing public anger. The Dhurandhar creative team did not create triumphalism from nothing; they amplified a national mood that was already present. At this level, the films are mirrors.

At the systemic level, however, the films clearly led. Before Baby, Indian audiences could not visualize covert operations. After Baby, they could. Before Phantom, the desire for revenge was private and inarticulate. After Phantom, it was public and cinematic. Before Dhurandhar, celebrating state violence was a fringe position. After Dhurandhar, it was mainstream culture. At this level, the films are tools. They gave the public capabilities it did not previously possess: the capability to see, to desire, and to celebrate. These capabilities are preconditions for democratic acquiescence to covert action, and the films provided them.

The feedback-loop model synthesizes both levels of analysis. Baby’s commercial success demonstrated audience appetite for spy-thriller content. This success signal was read by the market, and Phantom’s more emotionally intense premise was, in part, a market response to Baby’s proof of concept. Phantom’s performance and cultural impact (including the Pakistan ban) further heated the market, signaling that audiences would reward even more aggressive content. Dhurandhar’s creative team read these signals and produced a film calibrated to the cultural temperature they perceived, a temperature that Baby and Phantom had helped raise. Each film was both a response to existing taste and a shaping force that created taste for the next escalation.

Consider an analogy from military doctrine. A nation does not acquire a weapons system and then discover that it wants to use it. Nor does it want to use a weapons system and then magically acquire it. Capability and intent develop together, each enabling and amplifying the other. The relationship between India’s spy film trilogy and India’s covert action appetite follows the same logic. Baby provided perceptual capability (the audience could see the covert world). Phantom provided emotional capability (the audience could feel the rightness of revenge). Dhurandhar provided social capability (the audience could celebrate killing without stigma). Each capability enabled the next escalation of intent, and each escalation of intent created market demand for the next capability.

The feedback loop model implies that intervention at any point in the chain could have altered the trajectory. If Baby had flopped, Phantom might never have been greenlit. If Phantom had been received with moral revulsion rather than patriotic satisfaction, Dhurandhar’s creative team might have calibrated differently. The fact that the market rewarded each escalation, and that no film in the trilogy suffered commercially for pushing the boundary of acceptable cinematic violence, is the clearest evidence that the cultural trajectory was self-reinforcing. Each commercial success validated the escalation and incentivized the next.

This adjudication matters because it determines how we understand the relationship between India’s entertainment industry and its security posture. If the films merely followed taste, they are diagnostically useful but causally irrelevant, mirrors that reflect but do not shape. If they shaped taste, they are participants in the security landscape, cultural tools that contributed to the political environment in which the shadow war became possible and popular. The feedback-loop model says they are both, simultaneously, and that the distinction between mirror and tool collapses when the mirror is watched by hundreds of millions of people who adjust their attitudes based on what they see reflected.

The three-film trilogy of Baby, Phantom, and Dhurandhar is, in the end, the story of how India learned to celebrate killing. It learned in three stages, from three different teachers, over a period of years. The learning was not forced. It was voluntary, commercial, and democratic, in the most literal sense that millions of Indian citizens paid money to participate in each stage of the escalation. The result is a cultural environment in which the shadow war is not a policy to be debated but a narrative to be celebrated, and the celebration’s vocabulary, emotional register, and moral framework were all furnished by the Bollywood entertainment industry before the first real motorcycle pulled alongside the first real target on a Pakistani street.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which is better, Dhurandhar, Baby, or Phantom?

The answer depends entirely on what criteria “better” invokes. As a piece of filmmaking craft, Baby is the most disciplined and consistent, with Neeraj Pandey’s controlled direction producing a thriller that holds together from opening frame to closing credits without a single scene that feels unnecessary. Phantom has the most emotionally compelling premise, given its direct connection to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, but its execution is uneven, with pacing issues in the first half that undermine the screenplay’s ambitions. Dhurandhar is the most commercially successful and culturally impactful of the three, generating a level of audience engagement that transcended the cinema-going experience and became a national vocabulary. For viewers who value restraint and professionalism, Baby is the superior film. For viewers who prioritize emotional catharsis, Phantom delivers the most directly satisfying experience. For viewers seeking spectacle and cultural event, Dhurandhar is unmatched. The comparison is not a ranking but a diagnostic of what different audiences value in their engagement with cinematic depictions of state violence.

Q: How do the three spy films differ in their approach to violence?

Baby treats violence as a professional tool, deploying it with surgical precision and emotional detachment. The kills in Baby are efficient and unremarkable, designed to convey the competence of the operatives rather than the drama of the killing. Phantom treats violence as a vehicle for emotional release, constructing elaborate and inventive kill scenarios that provide cathartic satisfaction to audiences who share the film’s demand for 26/11 justice. Each kill in Phantom is designed to feel earned and satisfying within the revenge-fantasy framework. Dhurandhar treats violence as celebration, staging kills with cinematic energy, musical accompaniment, and dramatic choreography that transforms targeted assassination into crowd-pleasing entertainment. The progression from tool to vehicle to celebration tracks India’s evolving comfort with aggressive depictions of state-sponsored killing.

Q: Which Bollywood spy film is most operationally accurate?

Baby is the most operationally credible of the three films. Neeraj Pandey’s research-intensive approach to filmmaking produced a depiction of covert intelligence work that intelligence professionals have reportedly praised for its institutional plausibility. The communication protocols, team dynamics, and operational tempo depicted in Baby correspond to credible descriptions of how elite counter-intelligence units function. Phantom is the least operationally accurate, deliberately embracing fantasy scenarios (a single operative traversing multiple countries with improvised assassination methods) that prioritize dramatic impact over tactical realism. Dhurandhar occupies a paradoxical middle position: its individual operational sequences are more theatrically stylized than Baby’s, but its broader depiction of motorcycle-borne urban assassinations converges uncomfortably with documented patterns of real operations.

Q: Did Baby prepare audiences for Dhurandhar’s aggression?

Baby’s role in preparing audiences for Dhurandhar is indirect but essential. Before Baby, mainstream Indian cinema had not presented covert counter-terror operations with enough seriousness and institutional detail to make the concept tangible to general audiences. By demonstrating that covert units exist, that they operate with government sanction, and that their personnel sacrifice normal lives for national security, Baby established the institutional credibility that both Phantom and Dhurandhar subsequently built upon. Without Baby’s normalization of the covert world, Dhurandhar’s celebration of that world would have lacked foundation. The audience needs to believe in the institution before it can celebrate the institution’s work, and Baby provided the belief.

Q: Do the three films form a narrative trilogy?

The three films do not form a narrative trilogy in the conventional sense. They share no characters, no production teams, and no deliberate narrative continuity. However, they form what cultural analysts might call an ideological trilogy: three independent works that, placed in chronological order, trace a coherent arc of escalating national comfort with state violence. Baby represents the revelation phase (the covert world exists). Phantom represents the desire phase (we wish the covert world would avenge specific wrongs). Dhurandhar represents the celebration phase (the covert world’s violence is a source of national pride). This ideological coherence was not planned but emerged from three independent creative teams reading the same cultural trajectory and producing works calibrated to their specific moments in that trajectory.

Q: Which film was most commercially successful of the three?

Dhurandhar achieved the highest domestic box office collection of the three films by a significant margin, establishing itself as one of the top-grossing Hindi films of its release year. Baby earned approximately 95 crore rupees domestically, a strong return against its production budget but not a record-breaking performance. Phantom earned between 53 and 84 crore rupees domestically (source-dependent), a commercially disappointing result against its approximately 72 crore budget. Dhurandhar’s commercial dominance is not solely attributable to superior filmmaking quality; it reflects the cultural moment the film entered, the star power of its lead performer, and the evolved audience appetite that Baby and Phantom had cultivated over the preceding years.

Q: How does the protagonist’s moral code differ across the three films?

Ajay in Baby operates under a consequentialist moral code: his actions are justified by their outcomes (national security, lives saved), and the personal cost he bears (isolation, secrecy, lost relationships) is presented as the price of that consequentialist calculus. Daniyal in Phantom operates under a retributive moral code: his mission is explicitly framed as punishment for specific wrongs (26/11), and his personal redemption is achieved through the delivery of that punishment. Dhurandhar’s protagonist operates under a triumphalist moral code: his actions require no justification beyond the righteousness of the cause, and the act of killing itself is presented as inherently noble rather than as a necessary evil or a means to justice. The progression from consequentialism through retribution to triumphalism represents a significant ideological escalation that mirrors India’s broader cultural shift.

Q: What did each film add to India’s counter-terror self-image?

Baby added institutional awareness, demonstrating that India possesses covert counter-terror capabilities and that the people who staff these capabilities are professionals worthy of respect. Phantom added emotional permission, legitimating the desire for targeted revenge against specific perpetrators of terrorism and making that desire culturally acceptable to express in public. Dhurandhar added national pride, transforming covert killing from a necessary capability into a source of collective celebration and national identity. The cumulative contribution of all three films is the construction of a cultural infrastructure that supports, celebrates, and sustains public acceptance of India’s shadow war.

Q: How do the three films handle the India-Pakistan relationship differently?

Baby presents the India-Pakistan relationship through a narrow operational lens, focusing on specific threat actors without broad political commentary on the bilateral relationship. Pakistan exists in Baby as a source of threats to be neutralized, not as a political adversary to be engaged. Phantom’s treatment is more politically loaded, driven by the 26/11 connection that implicates specific Pakistani organizations and, by extension, the Pakistani state’s complicity in hosting and protecting them. Kabir Khan includes dialogue distinguishing Pakistani civilians from Pakistani terrorists, but the narrative’s emotional weight falls on the side of righteous Indian action against Pakistani-sourced threats. Dhurandhar’s Pakistan is the most simplified, presented as a landscape defined primarily by the presence of targets, with civilian and institutional complexity collapsed into a generalized adversarial environment.

Q: Is there a fourth film that could follow the trilogy’s trajectory?

The trajectory from revelation (Baby) through desire (Phantom) to celebration (Dhurandhar) suggests that a fourth phase might be exhaustion, saturation, or moral reckoning. If the cultural appetite for triumphalist counter-terror cinema eventually encounters diminishing returns, either because audiences tire of the formula or because a real-world event forces moral reassessment, a fourth film might occupy the space that Munich occupies in the Israeli context: a work that acknowledges the spiritual cost of what the nation has become. Alternatively, the fourth phase might be normalization: counter-terror violence becomes so thoroughly integrated into mainstream Bollywood storytelling that it no longer requires a dedicated genre, appearing instead as background texture in films about other subjects.

Q: Were all three films accused of government cooperation?

Baby received no significant accusations of government cooperation, though its sympathetic portrayal of covert units naturally aligned with the government’s security posture. Phantom generated more political friction, primarily through the Pakistan ban, but was not widely accused of being government-sponsored; Kabir Khan’s creative independence was generally accepted. Dhurandhar received the most sustained accusations of government adjacency, driven by its receipt of a National Film Award, government officials’ public references to the film, and the alignment between the film’s message and the ruling party’s political narrative. The progression from no accusation (Baby) to political friction (Phantom) to sustained debate (Dhurandhar) mirrors the films’ increasing political significance.

Q: How does Baby’s director compare to Phantom’s director in filmmaking approach?

Neeraj Pandey (Baby) is a filmmaker defined by procedural discipline and research intensity. His previous films, A Wednesday and Special 26, demonstrated a commitment to getting institutional details right and a respect for the audience’s intelligence that refuses to simplify complex scenarios for mass consumption. His approach to Baby was consistent with this track record: meticulous, restrained, and focused on institutional texture over emotional manipulation. Kabir Khan (Phantom) is a filmmaker defined by emotional engagement and political complexity. His body of work, including New York, Ek Tha Tiger, and Bajrangi Bhaijaan, consistently engages with Indo-Pakistani relationships and with the human dimensions of political conflict. His approach to Phantom reflected this orientation: emotionally ambitious, politically aware, and willing to acknowledge complexity even within a revenge-fantasy framework. The contrast between Pandey’s procedural discipline and Khan’s emotional engagement produces the tonal gap between Baby and Phantom that makes the trilogy’s arc analytically visible.

Q: Could these three films have been made in any other country?

The specific combination of factors that produced this trilogy, a decades-long unresolved conflict with a neighboring state, repeated mass-casualty terrorist attacks attributed to that state’s proxies, a massive and commercially sophisticated entertainment industry, and a democratic political system in which public opinion shapes security policy, is largely unique to India’s situation. Hollywood has produced individual films about targeted killing (Munich, Zero Dark Thirty), but the American entertainment-security complex has not produced a trilogy that traces an escalation arc comparable to Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar. Israeli cinema has explored targeted killing extensively but has not achieved the same mass-market cultural penetration that Bollywood commands. The three-film arc is a product of India’s specific political, security, and cultural conditions, and it is not easily replicable in other national contexts.

Q: How did Pakistan respond to each of the three films?

Pakistan’s response escalated in parallel with the films’ aggression. Baby received relatively muted attention from Pakistani authorities, as its restrained tone and focus on institutional process generated less political friction than the overtly political premises of the later films. Phantom provoked a direct institutional response: the Lahore High Court banned the film following a petition from Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the organization linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, arguing that the film defamed Hafiz Saeed (depicted under a pseudonym). The ban elevated Phantom’s cultural significance and confirmed that Pakistan viewed the film as a political act rather than mere entertainment. Dhurandhar generated the most sustained Pakistani response, with official condemnation, media counter-narratives, and social media engagement that positioned the film as evidence of Indian aggression rather than artistic expression.

Q: Do the three films accurately represent how RAW operates?

None of the three films provides an accurate institutional portrait of RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), India’s foreign intelligence agency. Baby’s depiction of a covert unit is institutionally plausible but does not claim to represent RAW specifically; the film creates a fictional unit that operates outside established agency structures. Phantom explicitly names RAW as the sponsoring institution, but its depiction of RAW’s operational methods (a single operative conducting multiple assassinations across continents) bears no resemblance to how intelligence agencies actually function. Dhurandhar’s depiction of RAW is the most stylized, borrowing more from Bollywood action conventions than from intelligence community reality. The comprehensive history of Bollywood’s RAW depictions traces how the agency has been progressively romanticized across the genre’s evolution.

Q: What role did the 26/11 Mumbai attacks play in shaping all three films?

The 26/11 Mumbai attacks of November 2008, which killed 166 people over four days of coordinated terror, serve as the emotional foundation for all three films, though each engages with the legacy differently. Baby uses 26/11 as background context: the post-26/11 security environment is the world in which the covert unit operates, but the film does not directly address the attacks. Phantom makes 26/11 its central premise, constructing an entire narrative around the fantasy of avenging the specific perpetrators. Dhurandhar absorbs 26/11 into a broader narrative of accumulated Indian grievance, treating it as one of many attacks that justify the covert response rather than as the singular motivating event. The progressive distancing from 26/11 as a specific event, from background (Baby) to central premise (Phantom) to absorbed context (Dhurandhar), mirrors the broader cultural shift from processing specific trauma to constructing generalized doctrine.

Q: Why is the Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar comparison more analytically significant than other film comparisons?

The analytical significance derives from three factors that no other film comparison in Indian cinema can replicate simultaneously. First, the three films were produced independently, without coordination, by different creative teams, ensuring that the escalation pattern reflects cultural forces rather than deliberate creative manipulation. Second, the three films were released within a compressed timeframe, making the escalation visible as a trajectory rather than as isolated data points separated by decades. Third, the three films engaged with the same subject matter (covert Indian counter-terror operations) using sufficiently different approaches to reveal the dimensions along which Indian attitudes were changing. No other set of three independently produced Indian films about the same subject, released in close temporal proximity, traces such a clear escalation arc. The comparison is analytically unique.

Q: Has any Bollywood filmmaker acknowledged the trilogy’s significance?

Individual filmmakers have commented on their own films’ relationship to the broader genre without explicitly acknowledging the Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar trajectory as a coherent unit. Neeraj Pandey has spoken about Baby’s role in introducing Indian audiences to serious spy cinema. Kabir Khan has discussed Phantom’s political dimensions and the Pakistan ban’s impact on the film’s reception. The Dhurandhar team has addressed questions about the film’s relationship to real events and its political significance. What has not emerged is a meta-commentary from any of the three creative teams acknowledging the escalation pattern that external analysis reveals. This absence is itself analytically interesting: it suggests that the escalation was experienced as natural progression rather than as deliberate radicalization, which reinforces the feedback-loop model.

Q: How do the soundtracks of the three films reflect their different approaches?

Baby’s soundtrack is minimal and functional, subordinated to the film’s procedural realism. The songs serve narrative purposes rather than emotional manipulation, and the background score emphasizes tension through ambient sound design rather than orchestral bombast. Phantom’s soundtrack is more emotionally invested, with compositions like “Afghan Jalebi” and “Saware” providing emotional texture that the screenplay sometimes struggles to generate through dialogue alone. The music in Phantom is evocative but not anthemic; it supports emotional engagement without demanding celebration. Dhurandhar’s soundtrack represents a qualitative leap in emotional intensity. The compositions are designed to be anthemic, to generate audience response not just during the film but in stadiums, at political rallies, and in social media contexts. Dhurandhar’s music transcended the film and became autonomous cultural artifacts, a development that has no parallel in either Baby or Phantom and that confirms Dhurandhar’s unique status as a cultural phenomenon rather than merely a commercial success.

Q: What is the lasting legacy of the Baby-Phantom-Dhurandhar trilogy?

The lasting legacy is the construction of cultural infrastructure for India’s shadow war. Before the three films, India’s covert counter-terror capabilities existed in the realm of classified operations, intelligence community knowledge, and occasional media speculation. After the three films, covert counter-terror operations exist in the realm of popular culture, national identity, and collective celebration. The trilogy transformed India’s relationship with state violence from an institutional arrangement (the government maintains covert capabilities, and citizens are not required to think about them) into a cultural relationship (citizens are aware of, invested in, and proud of covert capabilities, and they celebrate their exercise). This transformation is the trilogy’s lasting legacy, and it is irreversible in any meaningful timeframe. The cultural infrastructure the films built will outlast the films themselves.