Dhurandhar did not merely succeed at the box office. It rewired the circuitry connecting popular entertainment to state power in India, creating a cultural infrastructure that now operates independently of any single film, director, or star. The duology directed by Aditya Dhar and anchored by Ranveer Singh’s controlled, sepia-toned intensity has collectively earned over 3,000 crore rupees worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing Indian productions in history. Yet the financial figures, staggering as they are, represent the least interesting dimension of what Dhurandhar accomplished. The real legacy is not a movie. It is a system: a feedback loop between entertainment, media vocabulary, political rhetoric, and public appetite for covert state action that now sustains itself without needing Dhurandhar to play in any theater. This article, the capstone of the Dhurandhar Decoded series, traces that system’s architecture and asks the only question that matters going forward: what happens next?

The Film’s Version

To understand Dhurandhar’s legacy, one must first understand what the film itself argued about India, Pakistan, and the permissibility of violence conducted on foreign soil. The original Dhurandhar, released in December 2025, tells the story of Hamza Ali Mazari, played by Ranveer Singh, an Indian operative who infiltrates Karachi’s criminal underworld under deep cover. The narrative draws heavily from real geopolitical events: the 1999 IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai carnage. It fictionalized these incidents not to distance itself from reality but to collapse the barrier between what happened and what audiences wished had happened in response. The character of Ajay Sanyal, widely understood as an analog for National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, decides to dispatch Hamza on his mission as retribution for the IC-814 humiliation. That framing is significant. The fictional intelligence chief does not present the operation as a measured strategic response calibrated to achieve specific security objectives. He presents it as payback. Revenge, in the Dhurandhar universe, is not a complication to be managed but a virtue to be celebrated.

The sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, released in March 2026 to coincide with the celebrations of Gudi Padwa, Ugadi, and Eid, amplified every element the first film introduced. It retained the sepia palette, the unflinching violence, the deliberate interweaving of documentary footage with fictional narrative. But where the original tested the waters of what Indian audiences would accept, the sequel plunged in without hesitation. With a runtime of 229 minutes domestically and 235 minutes in overseas markets where additional violent content was retained, the second part expanded the narrative canvas to incorporate Operation Lyari, the 2014 Indian general election, and the 2016 banknote demonetization, folding an even wider slice of recent history into its fictional framework. Ajay Devgn, Kriti Sanon, and Suniel Shetty joined the cast, adding commercial star power to an already impressive ensemble. The film collected over 1,000 crore rupees worldwide within its first week, and its total haul of over 1,800 crore rupees made it the second-highest-grossing Indian production in history, the highest-grossing Hindi-language film domestically, and the highest-grossing A-rated Indian production ever released.

Critics from international publications described the second installment as angrier, louder, and more blatant in its messaging. Nicolas Rapold, reviewing for The New York Times, observed that the sequel intensified both the ultraviolence and the provocative blending of heroic theatrics with India-Pakistan history. Sowmya Rajendran, writing for Newslaundry, noted that while the first film worked across ideological lines due to strong storytelling, the sequel prioritized messaging over narrative craft. Shahana Yasmin of The Independent titled her review by observing that hypermasculine nationalism continues to sell in India. Siddhant Adlakha, reviewing the duology for Variety, described both films as vicious action blockbusters that cement what he characterized as a bleak transformation in the Hindi film industry.

These critical assessments matter not because they represent consensus, which they do not, but because they map the terrain of disagreement that Dhurandhar created. Indian reviewers and audiences largely celebrated the films. International critics largely questioned the politics. Pakistani authorities banned both films, then watched them top streaming charts in Pakistan anyway. The Gulf Cooperation Council countries denied certification to both installments, citing inappropriate and overtly inflammatory content directed at Pakistan. That ban cost the franchise one of Bollywood’s most lucrative overseas markets, estimated by the Lowy Institute to represent a meaningful share of potential international revenue. The commercial consequence has been negligible; the cultural consequence has been enormous. Dhurandhar demonstrated that a Hindi-language film could become the highest-grossing production in the industry’s history while being simultaneously banned across the entire Arabian Peninsula. The audience that mattered, Indian viewers at home and across the diaspora, responded with enough enthusiasm to make the GCC market irrelevant.

The film’s narrative posture was not subtle, and it was not trying to be. Previous Bollywood spy productions operated within a framework that acknowledged complexity even when they resolved it in India’s favor. The YRF Spy Universe, built across Ek Tha Tiger, Tiger Zinda Hai, War, and Pathaan, glamorized espionage while maintaining a cosmopolitan veneer where the protagonist could fall in love with a Pakistani woman and the audience was invited to see the enemy nation as containing sympathetic individuals. Baby (2015) and Phantom (2015) pushed the envelope further, introducing covert operations as central narrative engines, but both maintained a degree of moral restraint. The protagonist in Baby operates within a system of rules. The protagonist in Phantom carries emotional weight for the violence he commits. The progression from these films to Dhurandhar marks a decisive shift: Hamza Ali Mazari does not agonize. He does not question. He executes with precision and the audience cheers. The moral architecture that Spielberg spent three hours constructing in Munich, where every assassination corrodes the assassin’s humanity, is entirely absent from Dhurandhar’s framework. The comparison is not a judgment of artistic quality. It is an observation about what two democracies, Israel and India, chose to tell themselves about the cost of state violence at different points in their strategic evolution.

Producer Jyoti Deshpande of Jio Studios described the production approach as presenting a more nuanced take on patriotism while remaining highly engaging through immersive storytelling. Whether that self-description is accurate is precisely the debate the franchise generated. What is indisputable is the production’s ambition. Both films exceed three hours in runtime. Both received A-certificates from the CBFC for extreme violence, with the sequel running 229 minutes domestically and 235 minutes in overseas screenings where additional violent content was retained. Both were released in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada, maximizing linguistic reach across India’s diverse market. Both generated controversies that functioned as marketing events: the Major Mohit Sharma family’s legal challenge, the GCC bans, the Pakistani government’s condemnation, the harassment campaigns against critical reviewers. Each controversy expanded the films’ cultural footprint beyond what paid advertising could achieve.

Akkshay Rathi, a prominent theater owner and entertainment entrepreneur, articulated the distinction between Dhar’s approach and the YRF model with precision. He observed that the iconic spy films in recent Hindi cinema have been from the Yash Raj Spy Universe, which are extremely glamorized and stylized, whereas the Dhurandhar franchise sets its story against modern history between India and Pakistan, against the RAW and ISI conflict, making it far more believable. That observation captures something essential. Previous spy cinema in India operated within a register of fantasy: the protagonist was impossibly handsome, the locations were impossibly glamorous, and the stakes were impossibly high in ways that maintained comfortable distance from reality. Dhar collapsed that distance. His Karachi is not a backdrop; it is a researched reconstruction of a real city’s criminal geography. His political dynamics are not invented; they are fictionalized versions of documented power struggles between Pakistani politicians, criminal organizations, and intelligence agencies. His violence is not choreographed spectacle; it is brutal, close-range, and depicted with a clinical detachment that borrows more from documentary filmmaking than from action cinema.

Dhurandhar’s cultural timing was not accidental. The film released just months after Operation Sindoor, India’s military strikes against Pakistan in May 2025, following the Pahalgam tourist massacre. India was primed for exactly this kind of cultural product. Real operations conducted by unknown gunmen on Pakistani soil had been accelerating throughout 2024 and 2025, producing a documented pattern of eliminations that Indian media covered with increasing boldness. Journalists and analysts had already adopted the vocabulary of covert operations in their coverage, describing real killings with language that anticipated the cinematic treatment. Both Aditya Dhar films landed in a country that had already begun thinking about counter-terrorism in narrative terms. They did not create the mood. But they crystallized it, gave it a face, and turned it into a commodity that could be consumed, shared, and repeated.

Dhar’s own trajectory as a filmmaker is essential context for understanding what the franchise accomplished. His debut feature, Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), dramatized the 2016 Indian Army surgical strikes across the Line of Control in response to the terror attack on an army base in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir. That film earned over 340 crore rupees and entered popular culture through its catchphrase “How’s the josh?” which became a nationalist slogan deployed at political rallies and public gatherings. Uri demonstrated three principles that Dhar would refine in his subsequent work: first, that recent military operations could be dramatized with minimal temporal distance; second, that the commercial reward for nationalist intensity far exceeded the commercial reward for restraint; and third, that controversy generated by political content functions as free marketing in the age of social media amplification. His subsequent direction of Article 370 (2024), which dramatized the controversial revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status, further established his brand as a filmmaker willing to wade into politically charged territory where others hesitated.

From Uri through Article 370 to the franchise, Dhar’s career traces an escalation that mirrors the broader cultural trajectory this article examines. Each successive production pushed further into politically sensitive territory, generated larger revenues, and faced louder criticism from international reviewers while earning more enthusiastic domestic responses. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh observed that Dhar achieved something rare in an industry dominated by star power: becoming a recognizable directorial brand whose name alone guarantees audience interest. In an industry where directors are typically interchangeable and stars drive opening weekends, Dhar’s ability to command attention independent of his cast represents a structural shift in how Hindi cinema operates.

The Reality

The reality beneath the cinematic spectacle is simultaneously more complicated and more consequential than anything the film depicted. Dhurandhar’s legacy operates across four distinct domains, each reinforcing the others in a self-sustaining loop that no longer requires the films themselves to function.

Linguistic colonization represents the first domain. Indian media now routinely describes real targeted killings using Dhurandhar as a reference frame. When an India-wanted militant is shot dead by unknown assailants in Karachi, Lahore, or Rawalpindi, the coverage does not reach for intelligence terminology or legal frameworks. It reaches for cinematic vocabulary. Headlines describe operations as “Dhurandhar-style killings.” Television anchors invoke the film’s title as shorthand for covert justice. The terminology analysis reveals something remarkable: Dhurandhar did not borrow its vocabulary from reality. Reality now borrows its vocabulary from Dhurandhar. This linguistic colonization means that the film’s moral framework, where covert killing is heroic, precise, and emotionally satisfying, is embedded in the language used to discuss actual operations. Every time a news anchor says “Dhurandhar-style,” the audience processes the real event through the emotional register the film established. The distinction between fiction and policy coverage dissolves in the viewer’s mind, not because viewers are naive, but because the linguistic architecture makes the distinction unnecessary.

The second domain is political. The phrase “ghar mein ghus ke maarta hai,” which translates roughly to “he strikes inside the enemy’s home,” has fused the film, the Prime Minister’s rhetoric, and the real shadow war into a single, inseparable national narrative. Politicians from the ruling party reference Dhurandhar at rallies. The film’s songs play at political gatherings and cricket matches. The soundtrack’s adoption as a soundtrack for nationalism means that the emotional register of the film, aggressive confidence, unapologetic assertion, pride in the capacity for violence, is now available as a mood that can be summoned at will, detached from any specific policy debate. When Flipperachi’s “FA9LA” plays at a BJP rally, nobody is discussing the film’s plot. They are participating in a feeling that the film made possible and that politics now deploys.

Information warfare constitutes the third domain. The meme war that erupted after both films’ releases has created a permanent layer of conflict between Indian and Pakistani users on social media platforms. Dhurandhar imagery, dialogue screenshots, and remixed video clips are weaponized daily in a low-grade information conflict that operates without institutional coordination. Indian users deploy triumphalist memes featuring Singh’s character executing adversaries. Pakistani users counter with satirical reinterpretations, historical corrections, and parody content that reframes the film’s heroes as deluded aggressors. Neither side persuades the other. Both sides entrench their own audiences’ existing convictions. The meme war is the shadow war’s information dimension, fought by millions of civilians with smartphones, sustained by an inexhaustible supply of source material from two commercially successful films.

The fourth domain is industrial. Dhurandhar created a production template that Bollywood’s biggest studios now study, replicate, and iterate upon. Aditya Dhar demonstrated that a spy film grounded in recent India-Pakistan history, unburdened by moral ambiguity, and willing to incorporate real events with minimal fictional distance could generate revenues exceeding any previous Hindi-language production. The template includes specific elements: sepia visual treatment, ensemble casts mixing commercial stars with character actors, running times exceeding three hours, dual-part release strategies maximizing both theatrical and streaming revenue, and a deliberate willingness to court political controversy as a marketing asset rather than a liability. The GCC bans, far from damaging the franchise, generated global headlines that functioned as free publicity. The critical backlash from international reviewers drove engagement from domestic audiences who treated defense of the film as a patriotic act. Every element that conventional wisdom identified as a risk, length, violence, political polarization, ban-courting content, turned out to be a commercial advantage.

These four domains interact in ways that make the phenomenon self-reinforcing. Linguistic colonization of media vocabulary creates a permanent cultural presence. Political adoption provides institutional endorsement. Meme warfare generates continuous engagement. Industrial replication ensures that successor productions will follow the established approach.

Consider how the domains compound each other’s effects through a concrete example. When a militant affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba is shot dead by unknown assailants in Lahore, the event enters the four-domain system simultaneously. Indian television anchors describe the killing as another “Dhurandhar-style” operation, deploying the linguistic framework that makes the event legible as part of an ongoing campaign rather than an isolated incident. Political figures reference the killing at rallies or on social media, connecting it to the broader narrative of Indian strength and Pakistani vulnerability. Millions of users share memes featuring Ranveer Singh’s character overlaid on news screenshots, turning a real person’s death into content that circulates through entertainment channels. Producers note the public engagement and file the event as potential material for future productions. Each domain reinforces the others: the media vocabulary makes the political rhetoric feel natural, the political endorsement makes the media vocabulary feel authorized, the meme circulation makes both feel popular, and the industrial interest makes all three feel culturally significant.

No single institution designed this system. No strategic document authorized it. It emerged organically from the intersection of commercial incentives, political opportunity, technological affordance, and cultural appetite. That organic quality is precisely what makes the system durable. A government-directed propaganda campaign can be identified, criticized, and dismantled. A commercially driven cultural phenomenon that serves political interests without requiring political direction is far more resistant to critique because its defenders can accurately claim that it is simply what the market wanted. Aditya Dhar made movies. Audiences bought tickets. Media covered the productions. Politicians embraced the cultural moment. Users made memes. None of these actors were following instructions. All of them were responding to incentives that aligned without coordination, and that alignment produced a system more effective than any propaganda apparatus could design.

What makes this system particularly resilient is its distributed architecture. In a centralized propaganda model, removing the central authority disables the system. In the distributed model that has emerged organically, there is no central authority to remove. If Aditya Dhar never makes another film, the linguistic vocabulary persists in media coverage. If the BJP loses power, the memes continue circulating on platforms that no government controls. If Netflix removes both films from its library, pirated copies will continue to serve as source material for social media content. If Indian audiences tire of spy cinema entirely, the four domains, language, politics, information, industry, have already embedded themselves deeply enough in India’s cultural infrastructure that they will persist in dormant form, ready to be reactivated by any future security crisis that creates demand for the emotional register the franchise established. Distributed systems are, by their nature, resilient to disruption precisely because they lack a single point of failure.

Where Film and Reality Converge

The convergence between Dhurandhar’s fiction and India’s security reality extends beyond vocabulary and mood into structural territory that demands careful analysis. The cinema-to-policy pipeline that scholars and analysts debate in theoretical terms has, in the Dhurandhar case, produced observable effects that can be mapped with specificity.

The most striking convergence is temporal. The post-release operations timeline shows a measurable acceleration in reported targeted killings following the first film’s theatrical release in December 2025. Whether this acceleration reflects coincidence, intelligence maturation, cultural cover, or degraded Pakistani security posture following Operation Sindoor is unknowable from open-source analysis alone. The temporal correlation, however, is visible to anyone who plots the dates. The first film showed motorcycle-borne assassinations on screen. Real motorcycle-borne assassinations continued and accelerated in the months that followed. The second film premiered in March 2026. The killing tempo in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded any previous quarterly total. Correlation, of course, does not establish causation. But the correlation is there, it is visible, and it demands analytical engagement rather than dismissal.

A second convergence operates at the level of public permission. Before Dhurandhar, India’s covert campaign existed in a gray zone of official deniability. The government never acknowledged conducting targeted killings on Pakistani soil. Media reported them using cautious language: “unknown gunmen,” “mysterious circumstances,” “suspected gang-related violence.” After Dhurandhar, the gray zone has not officially changed, India still does not acknowledge the operations, but the public’s relationship to that deniability has shifted fundamentally. Audiences who watched Hamza Ali Mazari execute targets on screen with cool precision now read news reports of real killings with a framework for interpretation that the film provided. The deniability is maintained at the diplomatic level, but it is functionally inoperative at the cultural level. Everyone who saw the film knows what the “unknown gunmen” reports mean. The film gave the public permission to know what it already suspected and to feel proud of what it already believed.

This public permission has measurable downstream effects. Political leaders who once confined their references to counter-terrorism in abstract, policy-appropriate language now invoke cinematic terminology at public events. Rhetorical distance between a government press conference and a movie trailer has narrowed. When a senior official describes India’s willingness to “respond decisively” to cross-border provocations, the audience hears dialogue from the franchise’s opening sequence echoing beneath the diplomatic language. Cinema has become a layer of subtext that amplifies every official statement about counter-terrorism, regardless of whether the speaker intends the connection.

At the grassroots level, this permission structure manifests in how ordinary citizens discuss security policy. Before Aditya Dhar’s production, conversations about covert operations in Pakistan were the province of defense analysts, intelligence commentators, and journalists with security beats. After the franchise, these conversations moved to dinner tables, college campuses, and office break rooms. Citizens who had never engaged with security policy now have opinions about operational methodology, target prioritization, and the adequacy of India’s response to cross-border provocations. Those opinions are shaped not by policy papers or parliamentary debates but by a three-and-a-half-hour film that depicted an idealized version of what covert operations look like. The democratization of security discourse is, in one reading, healthy: more citizens engaging with national security means more democratic accountability. In another reading, it is dangerous: citizens who derive their understanding of covert operations from entertainment are equipped with emotional convictions rather than analytical tools, and those convictions may constrain policymakers who understand the operational realities that the film omits.

The institutional convergence extends to the security establishment itself. Reports suggest that Dhurandhar’s production involved research into real operational methods, real geographic settings in Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood, and real political dynamics within Pakistan’s criminal-political nexus. The film’s depiction of gang wars, politician-criminal-militant relationships, and ethnic animosities in Lyari was detailed enough that Pakistani authorities from Sindh province issued a formal rebuttal, objecting to the portrayal of their constituency as a dystopian criminal stronghold. Whether this level of detail reflects insider access, diligent open-source research, or imaginative reconstruction is precisely the kind of question that the film-reality analysis across this series has examined from multiple angles. The family of Major Mohit Sharma, the decorated Indian Army officer who died during an undercover operation and whose story the filmmakers deny using, sought a court injunction against the film’s release. The Delhi High Court did not block the release, but the legal challenge itself demonstrates how thin the membrane between Dhurandhar’s fiction and actual intelligence operations has become.

A third convergence operates through what social scientists call narrative infrastructure. Before Dhurandhar, India lacked a widely shared cultural narrative for processing covert operations against Pakistan. The operations existed, reported sporadically in media, denied officially, acknowledged obliquely by analysts. But there was no story that connected these disparate data points into a coherent arc with heroes, villains, motivations, and moral conclusions. Dhurandhar supplied that story. It told India that the country’s intelligence services had been conducting sophisticated, long-duration operations inside Pakistan; that these operations were responses to specific provocations (IC-814, Parliament attack, Mumbai); that the operatives were ordinary citizens who sacrificed personal identity for national duty; and that the violence they committed was not merely justified but noble. Once this narrative infrastructure exists, every subsequent piece of information about the real shadow war slots neatly into the framework the film built. New reports of targeted killings become new chapters in a story the audience already knows. The narrative infrastructure is self-reinforcing because every real event that fits the pattern confirms the story’s validity, while events that contradict it are either ignored or rationalized as exceptions.

The convergence also extends to Pakistan’s response. Pakistani authorities, by banning both installments, drawing official attention to their content, commissioning a rebuttal film, and allowing their media to devote extensive coverage to criticizing the productions, inadvertently amplified the franchise’s cultural significance. Every Pakistani denunciation of the films as propaganda confirmed, in the eyes of Indian audiences, that the productions had touched a nerve because they were true. Both bans drove Pakistani viewers to pirated streams and VPN-enabled Netflix access, making the franchise the most-discussed cultural artifact in Pakistan despite being officially unavailable. The first film topped Netflix’s non-English chart globally after its streaming release in January 2026, including viewership from Pakistan itself. The paradox is precise: Pakistan’s attempts to suppress the films’ reach became the most effective evidence, in Indian discourse, that the depiction of Pakistani vulnerability was accurate.

Pakistan’s institutional response reveals a deeper structural problem that the franchise exploited. Islamabad has historically struggled to produce cultural counter-narratives that match Bollywood’s production quality, star power, and distribution reach. Pakistani cinema, despite a revival in the 2010s with films like Waar and Yalghaar, operates with budgets that are a fraction of what major Hindi productions command. The Sindh government’s announced rebuttal film would need to overcome not just creative challenges but structural ones: limited international distribution networks, an audience base that is a fraction of Bollywood’s global reach, and the fundamental asymmetry of a counter-narrative competing against a cultural product that has already defined the terms of the debate. Pakistani intellectuals, journalists, and scholars have produced thoughtful critiques of the franchise’s politics, its historical inaccuracies, and its dehumanizing portrayal of Pakistani communities. These critiques circulate in academic journals, opinion pages, and analytical publications. They reach policymakers and international analysts. They do not reach the tens of millions of Indian moviegoers whose understanding of Pakistan is being shaped by what they see on screen.

Additionally, the franchise’s convergence with India’s broader cultural trajectory cannot be understood in isolation from the political environment that produced it. Since 2014, according to analysts from the Lowy Institute and other international research bodies, Hindi cinema has experienced a notable increase in productions that cast Muslim characters as antagonists, that celebrate military operations against Pakistan, and that receive institutional support from BJP-governed states through tax exemptions and public endorsements. The CBFC, a government body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, certifies films for release; that certification has been interpreted internationally not as neutral regulatory action but as implicit endorsement of content that serves the government’s political messaging. Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Article 370 (2024), The Kashmir Files (2022), and The Kerala Story (2023) preceded the Dhar franchise in establishing the commercial viability of politically charged nationalist content. What the franchise added was scale: a production ambitious enough to tell a three-and-a-half-hour story about covert operations, expensive enough to achieve world-class production values, and commercially successful enough to make every subsequent nationalist production seem not just permissible but financially prudent.

Where Film and Reality Diverge

The divergences between Dhurandhar’s cinematic universe and the reality of India’s covert operations are as analytically important as the convergences, and the capstone position of this article requires naming them clearly.

The most fundamental divergence is moral. Dhurandhar presents covert operations as emotionally uncomplicated. Hamza Ali Mazari does not suffer nightmares. He does not question whether the targets he eliminates are the right people. He does not contemplate the possibility that his actions might produce blowback, radicalize new recruits, or escalate the very conflict he is sent to resolve. The real shadow war, to the extent that it can be analyzed from open sources, is not emotionally uncomplicated for anyone involved: not for the operatives, not for the intelligence agencies managing risk, and not for the targets’ communities where each killing produces both fear and fury. By excising moral complexity from the narrative, Dhurandhar produces a version of covert operations that is emotionally satisfying but analytically incomplete. Audiences who process real events through Dhurandhar’s framework receive the emotional satisfaction without the analytical complication. This is not a flaw in the filmmaking; Dhar is under no obligation to make a policy document. But it is a divergence between the film’s emotional register and the operational reality that the Munich comparison makes starkly visible.

Agency and control constitute a second divergence. Dhurandhar depicts Indian intelligence as possessing near-total operational control: knowing where targets are, accessing them at will, executing with minimal friction, and extracting operators cleanly. The real campaign’s documented record includes operations that went wrong, targets who survived assassination attempts, cases of mistaken identity or collateral damage, and periods of operational dormancy that suggest intelligence gaps or political constraints. The film’s version of perfect execution serves the narrative’s emotional logic but misrepresents the messy, contingent, often-failing reality of covert operations in hostile territory. Historians of intelligence know that every successful operation sits atop a pile of failures, dry runs, and abandoned plans. Dhurandhar shows only the successes. The genre evolution from victim to aggressor has, at its Dhurandhar apex, produced a protagonist who never fails, and failure is the defining experience of real intelligence work.

A third divergence is political. Dhurandhar presents the decision to conduct covert operations as straightforward, morally unambiguous, and politically costless. The fictional intelligence chief makes the call; the agent goes. In reality, decisions about covert operations on foreign soil involve calculations about escalation risk, diplomatic fallout, nuclear posture, alliance management, economic consequences, and domestic political vulnerability. The 2025 India-Pakistan crisis that produced Operation Sindoor demonstrated precisely how complex these calculations are: India’s military strikes were followed by Pakistani retaliation, international mediation pressure, and a ceasefire that required diplomatic concessions from both sides. The shadow war’s covert operations occur within this strategic environment, not outside it. Every targeted killing produces not just a dead militant but a set of consequences that must be managed: Pakistani diplomatic protests, potential retaliation against Indian assets, pressure from the United States and other mediating powers, and the possibility of escalatory spirals. Dhurandhar eliminates these consequences from its narrative. The result is a story where violence has no strategic cost, and that story is now embedded in how tens of millions of Indians think about the shadow war.

A fourth divergence concerns the human cost on the ground. Aditya Dhar’s Karachi is populated by gangsters, militants, corrupt politicians, and occasional sympathetic civilians who serve primarily as emotional props for the protagonist’s moral clarity. Real Karachi, and the real Lyari neighborhood both films depict, contains millions of people whose lives are affected by both the criminal-militant nexus the films dramatize and the covert operations India allegedly conducts. Targeted killings occur in populated areas: markets, mosques, residential streets. Neither film examines what happens to the bystanders, the witnesses, the families of targets, or the communities where the violence occurs.

Consider the specific geography that Dhar chose as his primary setting. Lyari is a neighborhood of approximately 700,000 people with a documented history of political activism, cultural production, and sporting achievement. It has produced championship footballers, renowned poets, and community organizers who have worked for decades to improve conditions in one of Karachi’s most underserved areas. The neighborhood’s gang warfare, which the franchise dramatizes with impressive detail, is real; but it represents one dimension of a community that residents describe in terms far more complex than the films allow. By selecting Lyari as the setting for a narrative about Indian intelligence operations, the franchise reduced a living community to a conflict zone, erasing the cultural richness that gives the neighborhood its identity and replacing it with a landscape of violence that serves the protagonist’s mission. Pakistani authorities from the Sindh government objected to precisely this reduction, issuing statements defending Lyari as a place of culture, peace, and resilience rather than the dystopian criminal stronghold the franchise portrayed.

This erasure has consequences beyond cinema. For Indian audiences who have never visited Karachi, the franchise’s depiction becomes the primary frame through which they understand a city of fifteen million people. The reduction of a complex metropolis to a cinematic conflict zone shapes how Indian audiences process information about Pakistan more broadly. When news reports describe events in Karachi, viewers whose reference frame is Aditya Dhar’s sepia-toned gangland see those events through a filter that the films installed. Lyari is not a neighborhood; it is a set. Karachi is not a city; it is a battleground. Pakistan is not a country of 230 million people with its own internal complexity, political debates, and aspirations for peace; it is an adversary whose physical geography exists primarily as a stage for Indian heroism. Hollywood’s depictions of Baghdad, Kabul, and Mogadishu have been criticized for performing the same reduction of complex cities to conflict backdrops. The franchise applies this reduction to South Asia’s own geography, with consequences that are more immediate because the countries share a border, a nuclear standoff, and millions of citizens who maintain family and economic connections across the divide.

The institutional divergence deserves specific attention. Aditya Dhar’s production depicts India’s intelligence agencies as unified, purposeful, and operating with clear political backing. In the cinematic universe, RAW and the Intelligence Bureau coordinate seamlessly, share information freely, and pursue objectives that the political leadership has explicitly authorized. The real relationship between these agencies, the military intelligence services, and the civilian political leadership is far more fractured, competitive, and institutionally complicated. Turf battles between agencies, disagreements over operational priorities, tensions between political risk tolerance and operational opportunity, and the bureaucratic friction inherent in any large intelligence establishment are entirely absent from the franchise’s depiction. Analysts who study India’s intelligence community, including scholars such as former RAW officers who have written about institutional dynamics, describe an establishment that is capable but constrained, ambitious but under-resourced, and frequently at odds with itself over strategic direction. What appears on screen as a hypercompetent apparatus is a projection of what India wishes its security establishment were, not a reflection of what it is.

Beyond institutional dynamics, there is a temporal divergence that the franchise flattens. Real covert operations unfold over months and years of preparation, surveillance, asset recruitment, and operational planning before any action occurs. Failed operations outnumber successful ones. Targets relocate, intelligence goes stale, political windows open and close, and operational teams face logistical constraints that no film has the narrative patience to depict. Dhar compresses this timeline into narrative segments that move from decision to execution with cinematic efficiency. An intelligence chief identifies a target in one scene; the protagonist is neutralizing that target in the next. This compression serves storytelling but misrepresents the grind of real intelligence work, where an analyst may spend three years developing a single source, a surveillance team may monitor a target for eighteen months before an operational window opens, and that window may close before the strike team can act. Cinema rewards decisive action. Intelligence work rewards patient accumulation. The divergence between these reward structures means that audiences who understand covert operations through cinema’s lens are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the enterprise.

There is also a geopolitical divergence that warrants examination. The franchise presents India’s covert campaign as operating in a bilateral vacuum: India acts, Pakistan reacts, and no other actors matter. Real covert operations on Pakistani soil occur within a dense web of international relationships. Washington’s interests in regional stability, Beijing’s strategic partnership with Islamabad, Riyadh’s financial leverage over both countries, and the multilateral architecture of the United Nations Security Council all constrain, enable, or redirect India’s operational choices. An operation that succeeds operationally may fail strategically if it triggers responses from third parties whose equities are affected. A killing in Karachi may provoke not just a Pakistani diplomatic protest but a Chinese expression of concern, an American request for restraint, or a Gulf state’s threat to reconsider economic partnerships. These geopolitical dimensions are invisible in the franchise because they are incompatible with the narrative’s emotional logic, where India’s actions are unilateral, autonomous, and unconstrained by any external authority.

What the Comparison Reveals

The system Dhurandhar created, the four-domain cultural infrastructure described above, now operates as a permanent feature of India’s strategic culture. The question this capstone article must address is not whether the system exists, it does, but what happens next. Three futures are plausible, and each carries different implications for Indian cinema, Indian security discourse, and the broader India-Pakistan relationship.

The first future is escalation. In this trajectory, each subsequent spy film pushes further than the last. Dhurandhar established that audiences would accept three-and-a-half-hour films depicting Indian operatives conducting targeted killings in Pakistan. The sequel demonstrated that audiences would accept even more violence, even more explicit political messaging, and even more aggressive blending of fiction with real events. The escalation future projects this trajectory forward: the next generation of spy films, whether from Aditya Dhar or from competitors seeking to replicate the Dhurandhar formula, will depict operations of increasing brutality, incorporate more recent real events with less fictional distance, and push the boundaries of what the Central Board of Film Certification will approve. The escalation future finds support in the industry’s economic incentives. Dhurandhar’s commercial success rewarded aggression. Studios that invest in spy films will study the Dhurandhar template and conclude, correctly from a revenue perspective, that more aggressive content generates larger returns. The YRF Spy Universe, which had previously operated within a framework of glamorized, cosmopolitan espionage, now faces competitive pressure to match Dhurandhar’s grounded intensity. Alpha, the upcoming female-led entry in the YRF franchise starring Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, is described as adopting a rugged, raw aesthetic that explicitly departs from the stylized tone of the Tiger and Pathaan films. The film reportedly focuses on a more grounded depiction of field intelligence operations, a direct response to Dhurandhar’s demonstration that audiences prefer grit over glamor in their spy cinema. If Alpha succeeds commercially, the escalation trajectory will be confirmed: an entire industry will have shifted toward that register.

Beyond YRF’s response, independent producers and directors across Hindi cinema and the regional language industries are studying the template. South Indian cinema, which has its own tradition of nationalist action films exemplified by KGF’s raw intensity and Pushpa’s anti-establishment energy, may produce spy narratives that combine regional storytelling traditions with the cross-border operational framework that Aditya Dhar popularized. Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada language productions about RAW operations, border conflicts, or counter-terrorism campaigns could expand the genre’s linguistic reach while maintaining its ideological orientation. Streaming platforms, which commission original content based on engagement metrics, are likely to pursue limited-series formats that extend the spy narrative’s appeal: an eight-episode series can explore the operational arc of a covert mission with a granularity that a three-hour film cannot accommodate. Amazon Prime, Netflix, and JioHotstar have all demonstrated willingness to invest in content that courts political controversy when engagement metrics justify the investment.

Escalation also carries risks that its proponents may underestimate. Each successive production must find a way to exceed its predecessor’s intensity without crossing into territory that alienates even the genre’s core audience. Violence has diminishing returns: the first on-screen execution shocks, the twentieth numbs. Political messaging has diminishing returns: the first assertion of national strength thrills, the tenth feels like a lecture. The commercial logic that rewards escalation eventually confronts the creative reality that audiences seek novelty within familiar frameworks. Escalation without innovation produces repetition, and repetition is the genre’s most dangerous enemy. The filmmakers who navigate this challenge successfully will be those who find new emotional registers to explore within the nationalist framework: humor, romance, internal conflict among protagonists, generational differences in how operatives understand their mission, or the personal costs of sustained deep-cover work. Those who merely replicate the Dhar formula with different stars and different targets will discover that imitation is not a sustainable business model.

Most prerequisites for escalation are already met. The Indian audience has demonstrated appetite. The censorship framework has proven flexible enough to grant A-certificates (adults only) to extremely violent content. The commercial model of dual-part releases has been validated. The GCC ban has been absorbed without significant financial consequence. The only constraint on escalation is creative: at some point, the films must find new real events to dramatize, new operational methods to depict, and new emotional registers to explore. But India’s security environment provides a continuous supply of real events, from the Pahalgam massacre through Operation Sindoor through the ongoing shadow war’s documented eliminations, and creative talent capable of packaging these events into commercially viable narratives. The probability of the escalation future is high, perhaps the highest of the three scenarios, precisely because it requires the fewest changes to the current trajectory.

Escalation’s implications extend beyond cinema. If each film pushes the boundary further, the cultural permission structure for real covert operations expands correspondingly. Today, the Indian public accepts the shadow war’s targeted killings as a reasonable component of national security policy. An escalation trajectory in spy cinema would normalize operations of increasing ambition: not just motorcycle-borne assassinations of mid-level operatives but drone-assisted eliminations, sabotage campaigns against Pakistani infrastructure, or cyber-warfare operations targeting military command-and-control systems. Whether the real security establishment would actually conduct such operations is a separate question from whether the public would accept them. Dhurandhar’s cultural contribution has been to expand the envelope of public acceptance. Escalating spy cinema would expand that envelope further, creating space for operations that are currently unthinkable in public discourse.

The second future is maturation. In this trajectory, Indian spy cinema evolves from the triumphalist register of Dhurandhar toward the moral complexity that characterizes the genre’s finest international examples. This is the Munich trajectory: a future where an Indian filmmaker of sufficient ambition and commercial standing produces a film that asks whether the shadow war is worth its cost, whether the operatives who conduct it are damaged by the violence they commit, and whether the campaign serves India’s long-term strategic interests or merely satisfies a national appetite for revenge that will eventually prove self-destructive.

Historical precedent supports the maturation future in other national cinemas. American war films evolved from the gung-ho patriotism of World War II-era productions to the moral anguish of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Hurt Locker. Israeli cinema moved from triumphalist depictions of the 1967 war to the soul-searching of Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon. These evolutions did not happen immediately after the conflicts they depicted; they required generational distance, political space for dissent, and audiences willing to engage with uncomfortable questions about their own nation’s conduct. Historian Ramachandra Guha has argued that moral complexity in cultural production follows, rather than leads, political maturation. If that analysis holds, India’s spy cinema will develop moral complexity only after the country’s political discourse creates space for questioning the shadow war’s methods and consequences.

Prerequisites for maturation are significant and largely unmet. Indian political discourse in its current configuration punishes dissent on security questions. Critics of the Dhurandhar films, including respected film reviewers, faced savage harassment on social media for describing the films as propaganda or questioning their nationalist messaging. The nationalism debate surrounding the franchise has demonstrated that the Indian public sphere currently treats criticism of nationalist cultural production as tantamount to disloyalty. In this environment, a filmmaker who attempted to produce India’s Munich would face not just commercial risk but personal and professional threat. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the political scientist who has written extensively about popular culture’s relationship to democratic erosion, would likely observe that the space for moral complexity in Indian cinema has been narrowing, not expanding, since 2014. Aarti Virani’s research on how entertainment normalizes state violence in democratic societies would suggest that the normalization process must first be recognized as a problem before moral complexity becomes commercially viable.

The maturation future’s probability is low in the near term but may increase over a longer horizon. Audience fatigue with the triumphalist register is one potential catalyst: if the third, fourth, and fifth productions attempting the same formula begin to feel repetitive, commercially diminishing returns could create space for alternative approaches. A second catalyst could be a failed or costly covert operation whose consequences are visible enough to prompt public reflection. If a botched assassination attempt produces diplomatic crisis, economic sanctions, or retaliatory violence that affects Indian citizens, the emotional calculus that currently favors triumphalism could shift toward questioning. A third catalyst could be generational change in the filmmaking community: younger directors who grew up watching both Hindi spy cinema and international productions like Sicario, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Americans may aspire to combine commercial viability with psychological depth, seeking to demonstrate that moral complexity and commercial success are not mutually exclusive. Shashi Tharoor, the author and diplomat who has written about India’s cultural soft power, would likely argue that India’s aspirations to global cultural leadership are ill-served by cinema that international audiences receive as propaganda. If that argument gains traction within the industry, maturation becomes not just artistically preferable but commercially rational for filmmakers targeting global rather than domestic markets.

Streaming platforms may play an unexpected role in enabling the maturation trajectory. Limited series formats, which allow for narrative complexity that theatrical films cannot accommodate, have already produced morally ambiguous espionage content in India: The Family Man, Special Ops, and Avrodh explored counter-terrorism themes with more psychological depth than any theatrical spy film had attempted. These streaming productions did not generate the cultural impact of a theatrical blockbuster, but they demonstrated audience appetite for espionage narratives that include internal conflict, institutional dysfunction, and the personal costs of intelligence work. A streaming platform willing to invest in prestige spy content, perhaps as an international co-production with a European or American partner, could produce India’s equivalent of a morally complex espionage drama without requiring the domestic box-office performance that makes theatrical experimentation so risky. Whether streaming commissions are sufficient to shift the broader cultural conversation remains uncertain, but they represent the most plausible near-term pathway to the maturation future.

The third future is saturation. In this trajectory, the Indian audience’s appetite for spy films diminishes not through maturation but through exhaustion. The spy genre, having delivered its biggest-ever commercial success, faces the paradox of its own triumph: everything after Dhurandhar will be compared to Dhurandhar and found wanting. Sequels will generate diminishing returns. Imitators will feel derivative. The audience will move on to the next genre cycle, just as it moved from the romance era to the action era, from the gangster era to the nationalist era, from the Baahubali spectacle era to the Dhurandhar espionage era. Saturation does not require the audience to reject the genre’s politics or question its moral framework. It merely requires boredom.

The saturation future finds support in Bollywood’s historical patterns. Every commercial formula that has dominated Hindi cinema has eventually exhausted itself. Multi-starrer action vehicles of the 1980s gave way to romance-driven narratives of the 1990s. Family drama vehicles of the early 2000s gave way to urban comedy formats. The YRF Spy Universe, despite producing multiple hits, experienced commercial volatility with Tiger 3 underperforming relative to expectations. War 2 likewise failed to match its predecessor’s cultural moment despite significant production investment. Saturation does not require audiences to reject what they previously loved; it merely requires them to have consumed enough of it. Once the emotional return on each subsequent entry diminishes below a threshold, audiences seek novelty, not because the old formula was wrong but because it has been fully absorbed.

Bollywood’s genre cycles tend to follow a specific pattern: breakthrough, imitation, peak, fatigue, replacement. Baahubali broke through with mythological spectacle in 2015-2017, generating a wave of big-budget historical and mythological productions. Some succeeded (RRR), many did not (Adipurush), and the genre settled into a lower-intensity steady state. Pushpa broke through with raw, vernacular anti-hero energy, generating imitators across multiple language industries. Animal, Singham Again, and other productions attempted to ride the intensity wave with diminishing commercial consistency. The spy genre’s cycle appears to have entered its peak phase with the Dhar franchise. Imitators are inevitable: Border 2, set for a Republic Day 2026 release, applies nationalist intensity to war cinema. Alpha attempts to extend the spy formula to female protagonists. Productions not yet announced will attempt to replicate Dhar’s formula with different stars, different settings, and different real events as source material. Some will succeed; most will face the comparison problem inherent in all post-peak genre entries. They will be measured against the franchise that defined the cycle, and they will be found less original, less powerful, and less culturally significant.

Saturation requires a successor genre capable of capturing audience attention. Bollywood’s history suggests that the successor genre is often unexpected: nobody predicted in 2017 that the Baahubali franchise would establish South Indian mythological spectacle as the dominant box-office force, nor that Pushpa would demonstrate that a Telugu-language gangster narrative could outperform Hindi productions in their home market. The successor to the spy genre may come from a regional industry, a streaming platform experimenting with narrative forms, or a genre that does not yet have a commercial template. The probability of saturation is moderate in the medium term, perhaps three to five production cycles from now, and increases over a longer horizon.

None of these three futures is mutually exclusive. The most likely actual trajectory combines elements of all three: a period of escalation as studios rush to replicate the Dhurandhar formula, followed by partial saturation as audiences tire of repetitive entries, followed by selective maturation as a few ambitious filmmakers attempt moral complexity while the broader genre settles into a lower-intensity steady state. The resulting landscape would resemble the American war film genre’s current configuration: a base of reliable action-oriented productions that serve the domestic audience’s appetite for martial entertainment, punctuated by occasional prestige productions that engage international critics and festival audiences. Whether India produces its own Hurt Locker, its own Munich, or its own Waltz with Bashir depends on variables that cinema alone cannot determine, specifically on whether India’s political culture develops the tolerance for self-reflection on security questions that moral complexity requires.

Across all three futures, the implication for the cultural infrastructure is clear. The system, the four-domain feedback loop of linguistic colonization, political adoption, meme warfare, and industrial template, survives in every scenario. Even in the saturation future, the vocabulary, the rhetoric, the meme reservoir, and the production knowledge persist. They become embedded features of India’s cultural landscape, available to be reactivated whenever the next security crisis creates demand for the emotional register Dhurandhar established. The system does not need continuous cinematic production to maintain itself. It needs only occasional reinforcement, which the news cycle itself provides every time an “unknown gunman” reports from Pakistan triggers a wave of Dhurandhar references in Indian media.

The Moral Maturation Question

Whether Indian spy cinema will develop moral complexity deserves deeper examination than the three-futures framework permits, because the answer reveals something fundamental about India’s current relationship with state violence and democratic accountability.

Moral complexity in espionage cinema is not a universal feature of the genre; it is a historically specific development that requires particular conditions. Steven Spielberg made Munich in 2005, thirty-three years after the Munich massacre and thirty-three years into Israel’s targeted-killing program against the perpetrators. That temporal distance was essential. Spielberg could examine the moral cost of assassination because Israel had already won, already mourned, already questioned, and already arrived at a national conversation about whether Golda Meir’s authorization of the Wrath of God program was worth its price. The film did not create that conversation; it entered a conversation that Israeli society had been conducting for decades through journalism, memoir, parliamentary inquiry, and previous cultural productions. Israeli journalist Aaron Klein’s account of the Wrath of God operation, Striking Back, had been published years earlier. Former Mossad operatives had spoken publicly about the toll the campaign exacted on their lives. Israeli cinema had produced earlier, less commercially prominent examinations of the assassination program’s human costs. Munich arrived in a culture that had already done the hard work of self-examination, and the film’s commercial success, while modest by Bollywood standards, reflected an audience prepared to engage with uncomfortable questions.

America’s trajectory followed a similar pattern. Hollywood produced triumphalist war films during and immediately after World War II, Korea, and the early stages of Vietnam. Moral complexity arrived a full decade after America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia: Apocalypse Now (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) appeared after the political consensus supporting the war had collapsed, after Congressional hearings had exposed governmental deception, and after a generation of veterans had spoken publicly about their experiences. These films did not create the anti-war movement; they translated an existing cultural reckoning into cinematic form. More recently, the American drone program’s moral complexity emerged cinematically only after journalistic investigations (by outlets including The Intercept and The New York Times) and legal challenges (including Congressional debates about authorization and accountability) had created a public discourse about the program’s costs. Eye in the Sky, Good Kill, and National Bird appeared after the political environment had created space for questioning.

India’s situation is structurally different. The shadow war is not a historical episode with a completed arc and a settled outcome. It is an ongoing campaign whose operational tempo is accelerating. The targeted killings are continuing. The geopolitical environment that produces them, Pakistan’s hosting of India-wanted militants, India’s growing capability and willingness to reach them, the post-Sindoor normalization of cross-border force, has not stabilized. Asking Indian cinema to produce moral complexity about an active campaign is asking it to undermine a live operation. No national cinema has ever done this successfully. American cinema did not produce critical examinations of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan while the drone program was at peak operational tempo. Israeli cinema did not produce morally complex assassination films while the targeted-killing program against Hamas leadership was actively underway. Moral complexity arrives after the shooting stops, or at least after it slows enough that reflection becomes possible without strategic cost.

This structural constraint has cultural reinforcement. India’s public sphere in its current configuration punishes dissent on security questions. But the constraint is not merely political. It is also commercial. Aditya Dhar’s box-office success demonstrated that triumphalist nationalist cinema generates revenues that morally complex cinema cannot match. Bollywood, like all commercial entertainment industries, responds to market signals. The market signal from the franchise is unambiguous: audiences will pay premium prices, attend multiple screenings, and defend the product on social media when a film validates their nationalist convictions. No morally complex spy film in any national cinema has generated comparable commercial returns. Munich earned $130 million worldwide against a $70 million budget, a modest commercial success. The Dhar franchise earned over $350 million worldwide across its two parts, a historic return. Markets do not reward moral complexity in espionage cinema on the scale that they reward triumphalism. This pattern holds globally, not just in India. But the scale of the Indian market amplifies the effect. A filmmaker who chooses moral complexity over commercial maximalism is leaving hundreds of crores on the table. In an industry where production budgets increasingly depend on projected returns, that choice becomes structurally difficult to make.

Complicating this further is the relationship between artistic ambition and career viability. Young Indian filmmakers who aspire to the kind of international recognition that festivals like Cannes, Venice, and Berlin provide must grapple with a paradox: the content that wins international critical acclaim is precisely the content that domestic audiences punish commercially. Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap, and other directors who have produced morally complex, politically unflinching work have never approached the commercial returns that Aditya Dhar achieves with triumphalist narratives. For a young filmmaker choosing between the Munich path and the Dhar path, the commercial calculation is overwhelmingly clear. Festival recognition provides prestige but not the production budgets required for ambitious filmmaking. Domestic box-office success provides both. Until the incentive structure changes, whether through audience evolution, streaming platform commissioning, or international co-production deals that de-risk morally complex content, the maturation trajectory remains a theoretical possibility rather than a practical likelihood.

The moral maturation question also intersects with India’s democratic health in ways that transcend cinema. Political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued that the relationship between popular culture and democratic erosion is not linear: popular culture does not cause democratic erosion, but it can both reflect and accelerate tendencies that are already present. If Indian democracy is experiencing a period of nationalist consolidation where security questions are insulated from public debate, as several international observers have argued, then morally complex spy cinema is not merely commercially risky but culturally dissonant. The audience is not asking the questions that moral complexity would answer. They are asking different questions, ones the triumphalist register addresses: Are we strong? Are we winning? Do our enemies fear us? These are not illegitimate questions. They are the questions that any nation facing genuine security threats naturally asks. But they are questions that moral complexity complicates rather than answers, which is why the audience that asks them gravitates toward Dhurandhar rather than toward Munich.

The most honest assessment of the moral maturation question is therefore: not yet, and not soon. Indian spy cinema will develop moral complexity when the political conditions permit it, the commercial incentives reward it, and the audience is ready to hear answers that make them uncomfortable rather than proud. None of these conditions currently obtain. All of them may eventually change. The timeline for that change is measured in decades, not film cycles.

The Soft Power Calculus

Dhurandhar’s impact on India’s soft power, the nation’s ability to attract rather than coerce, represents perhaps the most consequential long-term dimension of the franchise’s legacy, and the dimension where the costs of the Dhurandhar phenomenon are most clearly visible.

India’s soft power has historically rested on three pillars: the global appeal of its cultural production (Bollywood, cuisine, yoga, classical arts), the democratic credentials of the world’s largest democracy, and the aspirational narrative of a diverse, pluralistic civilization that manages deep differences through institutional frameworks rather than coercion. Each of these pillars has been complicated by the Dhurandhar phenomenon, though in different ways and to different degrees.

The cultural production pillar faces a paradox. Dhurandhar is, by any commercial measure, the most globally visible Hindi-language film in recent years. It topped Netflix charts across multiple countries. It generated international press coverage from The New York Times, Al Jazeera, NBC News, The Independent, Variety, and The Economist. By the metric of visibility, Dhurandhar has been a soft-power triumph: more people around the world are aware of an Indian film than at any point since Slumdog Millionaire, though that film was a British-Indian co-production with an English-language screenplay. But the nature of that visibility is the problem. International coverage has overwhelmingly framed Dhurandhar not as an artistic achievement but as evidence of India’s nationalist turn. Siddhant Adlakha’s Variety review described the duology as cementing Bollywood’s “bleak transformation.” The Economist asked whether India’s latest megahit constitutes propaganda for Narendra Modi. The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, published analysis arguing that the GCC bans carry a quiet warning that India’s remittance windfall from the Gulf region is not unconditional. The Lowy analysis specifically connected Bollywood’s hyper-nationalist productions to India’s broader diplomatic relationships with Muslim-majority nations, noting that the Indian government’s relationship with these films extends beyond passive approval to active facilitation through tax exemptions and institutional endorsements.

For India’s soft power, this framing means that the franchise’s global visibility comes with a content label that reads “nationalist propaganda” in every market except India and the Indian diaspora. These productions do not make international audiences want to visit India, learn Hindi, or engage with Indian culture. They make international audiences want to debate Indian nationalism, question Indian democracy, and worry about India-Pakistan nuclear escalation. These are not the emotional responses that soft power is designed to generate. Author Shashi Tharoor, who has written about India’s cultural soft power as a component of national strength, would likely observe that films in this mold convert soft power into hard power’s cultural clothing: the content looks like entertainment but functions as a projection of military capability and national aggression. That conversion may serve India’s strategic deterrence goals, but it diminishes the cultural appeal that soft power requires.

Understanding the scale of what is at stake requires examining the economic dimension of India’s Gulf relationships. Approximately nine million Indian workers reside in GCC countries, generating remittances that constitute one of India’s largest foreign exchange inflows. Indian businesses have invested billions in Gulf economies, and Gulf sovereign wealth funds have made significant investments in Indian infrastructure, technology, and financial markets. New Delhi has courted GCC members as economic partners, with bilateral investment estimated at upwards of $28 billion. Cultural products that alienate Gulf governments and their populations jeopardize these economic relationships in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore. When all six GCC nations independently decide to ban a Hindi-language production, that coordinated action communicates something beyond cinematic criticism. It signals that India’s entertainment industry has crossed a line that Gulf governments are willing to enforce, and that future crossings may carry consequences that extend beyond box-office revenue into the economic and diplomatic dimensions of the relationship.

Bollywood’s historical role as a soft-power vehicle in the Gulf deserves contextualization. For decades, Hindi films circulated widely in Gulf countries, creating cultural familiarity and emotional affinity between Indian and Arab audiences. Stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan were household names in Dubai, Riyadh, and Kuwait City. Film premieres in the UAE attracted tens of thousands of fans. This cultural penetration served India’s diplomatic interests by maintaining goodwill in a region critical to its energy security and economic prosperity. The franchise’s GCC ban represents a rupture in this long-standing cultural diplomacy. Audiences who once consumed Hindi cinema as entertainment are now confronted with productions that depict Muslim-majority nations as irredeemably hostile. Whether this rupture is temporary or permanent depends on whether the Indian film industry produces content that rebuilds the cultural bridge or whether the current nationalist trajectory continues to burn it.

India’s democratic credentials pillar faces a different complication. The GCC bans, the international critical response, and the harassment of domestic critics who questioned the film’s politics have collectively created an international perception that India’s cultural production is less free than it appears. The Central Board of Film Certification’s approval of both Dhurandhar installments, with A-certificates that acknowledge their extreme violence, has been interpreted internationally not as evidence of censorship restraint but as evidence of institutional alignment between the certification body and the government’s political interests. Whether this interpretation is accurate is debatable; the CBFC has approved many films that the government might prefer to suppress. But the perception matters for soft power purposes, and the perception is that India’s most commercially successful film is also its most politically aligned with the ruling party’s security narrative.

The pluralistic civilization pillar faces perhaps the most direct challenge. Dhurandhar depicts Pakistan, and by extension Muslims generally, through a lens that several international analysts have characterized as dehumanizing. Pashtun, Kashmiri, and Baloch characters are reduced to harmful tropes detached from their cultural identities. The representation of Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood as a lawless criminal stronghold erases the community’s cultural richness, its tradition of football and poetry, its history of political activism. For international audiences in Muslim-majority countries, Dhurandhar reinforces rather than challenges stereotypes about Indian attitudes toward Muslims. The film’s messaging makes it difficult for Indian diplomats to argue, in conversations with counterparts from Muslim-majority nations, that India is a pluralistic society that respects its own Muslim minority and treats Muslim-majority nations as partners rather than adversaries.

Viewing these three pillars together, the soft-power calculus presents a trade-off that India’s policymakers, cultural producers, and strategic thinkers have not yet explicitly confronted. Domestically, Dhurandhar is a triumph: it generates revenue, builds national pride, reinforces public support for security policy, and provides a cultural vocabulary for processing real events. Internationally, Dhurandhar is a liability: it damages India’s cultural brand, complicates diplomatic relationships with Muslim-majority nations, reinforces negative perceptions of Indian nationalism, and converts soft power’s attractive capacity into hard power’s coercive messaging. The trade-off is not hypothetical. The GCC bans represent a real cost. The international press coverage represents a real framing problem. The diplomatic complications with Pakistan, already severe after Operation Sindoor, are not eased by a cultural production that the entire Muslim world interprets as triumphalist aggression.

Whether India can afford this trade-off depends on how one weighs domestic benefits against international costs. If India’s strategic priority is domestic cohesion and public support for security policy, the trade-off is favorable: the domestic benefits of national pride and policy support outweigh the international costs of diplomatic friction and soft-power erosion. If India’s strategic priority is global leadership, economic integration with the Middle East, and the cultural soft power that supports both, the trade-off is unfavorable: Dhurandhar’s international costs exceed its domestic benefits when measured against global strategic objectives.

The answer, predictably, is that India’s priorities are not unitary. Different institutions, different political actors, and different strategic communities weigh these factors differently. The Ministry of External Affairs, which manages diplomatic relationships with Gulf nations and seeks to protect the interests of nine million Indian workers in the region, may view the franchise’s cultural impact with alarm. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which oversees the CBFC and facilitates tax-free declarations for politically favored films, may view the same impact with satisfaction. The intelligence community, which benefits from public support for covert operations, may welcome the cultural cover that entertainment provides. The film industry, which responds to revenue signals rather than strategic calculations, simply follows the money.

This institutional fragmentation means that the cultural phenomenon proceeds without any single actor taking responsibility for its consequences. When a Gulf government raises concerns about Hindi cinema’s anti-Pakistani content in a diplomatic meeting, no Indian interlocutor can claim authority over the cultural production in question. When a Pakistani diplomat argues that the franchise constitutes cultural aggression, no Indian counterpart can credibly promise that future productions will be different. When an international analyst observes that India’s entertainment industry is undermining its own diplomatic objectives, no Indian institution can acknowledge the problem without also acknowledging that the government facilitated the productions in question. The result is a policy vacuum where cultural effects of strategic consequence accumulate without strategic management, and the absence of management becomes self-perpetuating because acknowledging the problem would require acknowledging complicity.

The absence of strategic direction is itself the legacy’s most important feature. The system that Aditya Dhar’s productions created operates autonomously, generating cultural effects that no single institution controls and that no strategic assessment explicitly authorized. Both films were commercial products, not policy instruments. But their effects are policy-relevant, and their consequences, both domestic and international, will compound over time in ways that the industry, the government, and the public have not yet fully reckoned with. When historians of Indian strategic culture examine this period decades from now, they will find that the most consequential shift in public attitudes toward covert operations was driven not by a government white paper, a parliamentary debate, or a prime ministerial address, but by a Bollywood filmmaker who made two very profitable movies about a very sensitive subject and let the cultural system do the rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is Dhurandhar’s lasting legacy for Indian cinema?

Dhurandhar’s legacy extends far beyond its box-office records or critical reception. The duology created a production template that demonstrated how to combine fictionalized real events, extreme violence, nationalist messaging, and dual-part release strategies into a commercially dominant formula. More significantly, it established that Hindi-language spy cinema could generate revenues exceeding any previous production in the industry’s history while simultaneously being banned in major international markets. The legacy also includes the cultural vocabulary the film introduced, with Indian media adopting “Dhurandhar-style” as shorthand for real covert operations, and the political adoption of the film’s rhetoric and music by the ruling party for campaign events and nationalist rallies.

Q: Has Dhurandhar permanently changed the spy film genre in India?

The evidence strongly suggests a permanent shift. Before Dhurandhar, the dominant spy cinema model in India was the YRF Spy Universe’s glamorized, cosmopolitan approach, where protagonists fell in love with adversaries’ nationals and the tone prioritized entertainment over political messaging. After Dhurandhar, even the YRF franchise has pivoted: Alpha, the upcoming female-led entry, has been described as adopting a rugged, raw aesthetic that explicitly departs from the stylized approach of the Tiger and Pathaan films. The shift is not merely aesthetic; it reflects a fundamental reorientation of what audiences expect from the genre. They expect grounding in recent real events, they expect an unflinching posture toward Pakistan, and they expect emotional registers that validate rather than complicate national pride.

Q: Will Indian spy films eventually develop moral complexity?

Historical patterns from other national cinemas suggest that moral complexity typically emerges after significant temporal distance from the events depicted and after the political conditions create space for self-reflection on security questions. American cinema took decades to produce morally complex Vietnam War films. Israeli cinema required more than thirty years to move from triumphalist depictions of the 1967 war to the soul-searching of Waltz with Bashir. India’s shadow war is an active campaign with accelerating operational tempo, and the current political environment punishes dissent on security questions with social media harassment and professional consequences. The moral maturation trajectory is therefore plausible over a long horizon, measured in decades, but unlikely in the near term.

Q: Could India produce a film like Munich about the shadow war?

India could technically produce such a film, as there is no legal barrier to a filmmaker exploring the moral costs of targeted killings. The barriers are commercial, political, and cultural. Commercially, the Indian market has demonstrated that triumphalist espionage cinema generates returns that morally complex cinema cannot match. Politically, a filmmaker who questioned the shadow war’s moral framework would face accusations of disloyalty in a public sphere that currently equates criticism of security policy with anti-national sentiment. Culturally, the audience that drives spy cinema’s box-office success is seeking validation, not complication. A Munich-style film would likely find a small, appreciative domestic audience and significant international critical attention, but it would not approach the commercial returns that the Dhurandhar template delivers.

Q: Is the spy cinema genre sustainable or will audiences tire of it?

Every dominant genre in Bollywood’s history has eventually reached saturation, from the multi-starrer action formula of the 1980s to the family drama of the early 2000s. The spy genre’s sustainability depends on its ability to find new real events to dramatize, new emotional registers to explore, and new production approaches to maintain audience interest. The saturation risk is real but mitigated by India’s continuously active security environment, which provides a steady supply of new incidents, crises, and operations for dramatization. The most likely trajectory is a peak period of production in the next three to five years, followed by a gradual decline as the template becomes repetitive, with occasional high-profile productions breaking through when a particularly dramatic real event provides fresh narrative material.

Q: Has Dhurandhar damaged or enhanced India’s soft power?

The answer depends on the audience. Domestically and within the Indian diaspora, Dhurandhar has enhanced national pride, reinforced public support for security policy, and provided a cultural vocabulary for processing covert operations. Internationally, the franchise has complicated India’s soft-power positioning by generating press coverage that frames the films as nationalist propaganda, triggering bans across the entire Gulf Cooperation Council, and reinforcing perceptions that India’s cultural production is increasingly aligned with the ruling party’s political messaging. The Lowy Institute has specifically warned that Bollywood’s hyper-nationalist productions carry diplomatic costs in India’s relationships with Muslim-majority nations, particularly in the Gulf region where millions of Indian workers reside.

Q: What comes after the Dhurandhar era for Bollywood?

Three scenarios are plausible. The escalation scenario sees each subsequent spy film pushing further in violence and nationalist messaging. The maturation scenario sees Indian cinema developing moral complexity in its treatment of covert operations, producing its own equivalent of Munich or Zero Dark Thirty. The saturation scenario sees audiences tiring of the spy genre and moving to the next commercial cycle. The most likely actual trajectory combines elements of all three: a period of escalation as studios replicate the formula, followed by partial saturation as repetition breeds diminishing returns, followed by selective maturation as a few ambitious filmmakers attempt more nuanced approaches while the broader genre settles into a steady state.

Q: What system did Dhurandhar create beyond the film itself?

Dhurandhar created a self-sustaining cultural infrastructure operating across four domains. First, a linguistic domain where media vocabulary now describes real operations using cinematic terminology. Second, a political domain where the film’s rhetoric and music have been adopted by political parties for campaign events. Third, an informational domain where millions of users conduct a continuous meme war using Dhurandhar imagery. Fourth, an industrial domain where the production template has been studied and replicated by competing studios. These four domains interact to create a feedback loop that no longer requires the films themselves to function. The system sustains itself through the news cycle, political events, and social media engagement.

Q: How did the GCC ban affect the Dhurandhar franchise?

Both Dhurandhar and its sequel were banned across all six Gulf Cooperation Council nations: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar. The bans cited politically sensitive and inappropriate content directed at Pakistan. The commercial impact has been surprisingly limited because the domestic Indian market and the Indian diaspora in non-GCC territories provided sufficient revenue to make the franchise the highest-grossing Hindi-language production in history. The cultural impact has been more significant: the bans generated international headlines that functioned as free publicity, drove Pakistani viewers to pirated and VPN-enabled streaming access, and created a narrative where the film’s controversy itself became evidence of its cultural significance.

Q: Did the Indian government support the Dhurandhar films?

The films were produced by Jio Studios and B62 Studios as commercial productions. The Indian government did not officially produce, fund, or commission them. However, several observers have noted indirect support: the CBFC granted both films A-certificates despite extreme violence, multiple BJP-governed states declared the films tax-free to boost viewership, and senior political figures publicly endorsed the productions. The family of Major Mohit Sharma sought a court injunction against the first film’s release, arguing that Singh’s character was based on the officer without consent, but the Delhi High Court did not block the release. The relationship between the government and the franchise is therefore best described as alignment rather than direction: the films serve the government’s narrative interests, and the government facilitates their distribution, without a direct commissioning relationship.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar phenomenon compare to Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon?

The comparison is instructive but imperfect. Hollywood has a formalized relationship with the Department of Defense through which the Pentagon provides logistical support, equipment, and technical advice to films that depict the military favorably. This relationship is transparent, contractual, and documented. India has no equivalent formal program. The relationship between Bollywood and the Indian security establishment is informal, undocumented, and operates through personal connections, tacit encouragement, and the alignment of commercial and political interests. The effect is similar, both systems produce entertainment that validates state violence and reinforces public support for military operations, but the mechanisms are different. The American system’s transparency allows for public scrutiny and debate. The Indian system’s informality makes scrutiny more difficult and debate more contentious.

Q: Why does the Dhurandhar franchise generate more controversy than previous spy films?

Three factors distinguish Dhurandhar from predecessors like Baby, Phantom, or the YRF Spy Universe films. First, the minimal fictional distance: Dhurandhar incorporates real audio recordings, news footage, and named events (IC-814, Parliament attack, Mumbai attacks) with less fictionalization than any previous production. Second, the absence of moral restraint: unlike Baby’s protagonist who operates within rules or Phantom’s protagonist who carries emotional weight for his violence, Dhurandhar’s Hamza Ali Mazari kills without hesitation, regret, or complication. Third, the timing: the films released during an active security crisis, months after Operation Sindoor, in a political environment where nationalism is not just a cultural mood but an electoral strategy. The combination of minimal distance, maximal confidence, and crisis timing produced a cultural artifact that is impossible to receive as mere entertainment.

Q: What role does streaming play in the Dhurandhar legacy?

Streaming has been essential to the franchise’s cultural penetration. After its theatrical run, the first Dhurandhar was released on Netflix in January 2026, where it topped the platform’s global chart for non-English films. This streaming release extended the film’s reach beyond theatrical audiences to include viewers in markets where the film was banned, particularly Pakistan, where Netflix access through VPNs enabled widespread viewing despite the official prohibition. The streaming release also enabled repeat viewing, clip sharing, and meme creation on a scale that theatrical-only distribution could not have produced. The sequel’s digital rights were acquired by JioHotstar for the Indian market and by Netflix for international territories, ensuring that both films will remain accessible and culturally active for years beyond their theatrical windows.

Q: Is there a feminist future for Indian spy cinema?

Alpha, the upcoming YRF Spy Universe entry starring Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, represents the first female-led installment in India’s most commercially successful spy franchise. The film signals an industry-level recognition that the spy genre’s audience is not exclusively male and that female-led action narratives can command commercial investment. However, the feminist potential of the film is constrained by the genre’s established register. If Alpha adopts the Dhurandhar template of nationalism-without-complexity, it will merely extend the existing formula to female protagonists without changing the genre’s political or moral orientation. A genuinely feminist contribution to Indian spy cinema would need to interrogate the genre’s assumptions about violence, heroism, and national identity, which the current commercial environment does not incentivize. The film’s commercial performance will determine whether female-led spy cinema becomes a permanent feature of the genre or a one-time experiment.

Q: How do Dhurandhar’s critics respond to accusations of being anti-national?

Film critics who questioned the Dhurandhar franchise’s politics faced severe harassment, particularly on social media platforms. Sucharita Tyagi, an Indian movie critic, described needing to disable comments on her Instagram and YouTube accounts for the first time in her career after her review described the film as propaganda. The pattern of harassment includes accusations of anti-national sentiment, coordinated targeting across multiple platforms, and the conflation of film criticism with political disloyalty. Critics have responded by noting that criticism of a commercial entertainment product is not equivalent to opposition to national security policy, and that a democracy requires the capacity to distinguish between supporting the military and supporting every cultural product that invokes the military. These responses have had limited effect on the harassment campaigns, which appear to be driven by the genuine conviction among many audiences that the film represents not a point of view but a truth that criticism attacks.

Q: What is the significance of the Dhurandhar films being banned in Pakistan?

Pakistan’s ban on both Dhurandhar films is significant precisely because of its ineffectiveness. The official ban was followed by the film topping streaming charts in Pakistan through VPN-enabled Netflix access, widespread piracy, and extensive media coverage that guaranteed every Pakistani who wanted to see the film could do so. The ban’s failure demonstrates that in the streaming era, national censorship of foreign entertainment products is functionally obsolete. More importantly, the ban created a paradox that served Indian cultural interests: Pakistani authorities’ insistence that the film was dangerous propaganda confirmed, in Indian discourse, that the film had successfully depicted a truth Pakistan wanted to suppress. The ban became part of the film’s marketing narrative, a validation-through-prohibition that no advertising campaign could have achieved.

Q: How has Aditya Dhar’s career evolved through the Dhurandhar franchise?

Aditya Dhar’s trajectory from Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) through Article 370 to the Dhurandhar duology represents one of the most commercially successful directorial arcs in Hindi cinema history. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh has observed that Dhar achieved something rare in an industry dominated by stars: becoming a recognizable directorial brand. His first film, Uri, was a blockbuster; his second major release, Dhurandhar, became the highest-grossing Hindi film ever; and the sequel appears poised to break additional records. Dhar’s significance extends beyond commercial success to the demonstrable influence his approach has exerted on the industry. He established that grounded, research-intensive spy cinema, rooted in real events and willing to court political controversy, could outperform the glamorized, cosmopolitan spy cinema that previously dominated the genre.

Q: Does the Dhurandhar phenomenon have parallels in other countries?

Perhaps the closest parallel is the American military entertainment complex, where films like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lone Survivor generated enormous commercial success while depicting contested military operations in politically sympathetic terms. American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, earned over $540 million worldwide and generated similar debates about whether it was patriotic tribute or nationalist propaganda. Like Dhurandhar, American Sniper depicted real operations with minimal fictional distance and received both enthusiastic domestic audiences and critical international reviews. The key difference is that American cinema eventually produced counterweights: films like The Report, which questioned the CIA’s interrogation program, and Collateral Damage documentaries that examined the costs of drone warfare. Whether Indian cinema will produce similar counterweights depends on the political and commercial conditions discussed in this article’s three-futures framework.

Q: What impact has Dhurandhar had on India-Pakistan relations beyond cinema?

Both films have contributed to the hardening of public attitudes on both sides of the border. In India, the franchise reinforces the narrative that Pakistan is an irremediable adversary that shelters terrorists and that covert action against that adversary is both necessary and heroic. In Pakistan, the franchise reinforces the narrative that India harbors aggressive intentions, that Bollywood functions as a propaganda arm of the Indian state, and that the international community’s tolerance of such cultural productions reflects a double standard. These narrative effects compound the already-severe diplomatic tensions following Operation Sindoor and the ongoing shadow war. The film did not create these tensions, but it has made reconciliation more difficult by embedding the adversarial narrative in popular culture on both sides.

Q: Could a Pakistani filmmaker produce a counter-Dhurandhar film?

Sindh’s provincial government announced its support for a rebuttal film that would counter Dhurandhar’s depiction of Lyari and Karachi. Whether this production materializes and reaches international audiences is uncertain. Pakistani cinema lacks the production infrastructure, star power, and global distribution networks that Bollywood commands. A Pakistani counter-narrative would face structural disadvantages in reaching international audiences even if the creative execution were comparable. The more effective Pakistani response has been critical journalism, academic analysis, and diplomatic engagement, which reach international policymakers and opinion leaders more reliably than commercial cinema.

Q: What lessons does the Dhurandhar phenomenon offer for understanding the relationship between entertainment and national security?

Several lessons emerge. First, in a democracy with a commercially vibrant entertainment industry, cultural products can generate strategic effects that no government program could achieve. No Indian government information campaign could have accomplished what Dhurandhar accomplished: making tens of millions of citizens not merely aware of but emotionally invested in covert operations against Pakistan. The secondary lesson is that these effects, once generated, operate autonomously. The government did not commission the films, does not control the meme war, and cannot calibrate the diplomatic consequences of the cultural phenomenon the films created. The tertiary lesson is that the relationship between entertainment and national security is not unidirectional. Dhurandhar did not merely reflect existing public attitudes; it shaped them, intensified them, and provided them with a vocabulary, a visual register, and an emotional framework that did not exist before the first frame appeared on screen.

Q: How does the Dhurandhar legacy affect future India-Pakistan diplomatic engagement?

Diplomatic engagement between nuclear-armed adversaries has always required leaders to operate at some distance from their publics’ emotional register. Peace negotiations, confidence-building measures, and back-channel communication work best when publics are not paying close attention. Aditya Dhar’s franchise has made the Indian public pay very close attention to the adversarial dimension of the India-Pakistan relationship. Any future diplomatic initiative toward Pakistan will now face a citizenry that processes the relationship through the franchise’s framework, where engagement with Pakistan is suspect and violence against Pakistan is heroic. This does not make diplomacy impossible, but it raises its political cost considerably. Leaders who seek accommodation with Pakistan must now overcome not just the structural obstacles to peace but the cultural infrastructure that has been built, a system that equates toughness with patriotism and dialogue with weakness. Previous diplomatic openings, from the Lahore Declaration of 1999 to the Composite Dialogue of 2004-2008 to the Modi-Sharif engagement of 2015, occurred in cultural environments where the Indian public was willing to entertain the possibility of normalization. Each opening collapsed for strategic rather than cultural reasons. Future openings will face both strategic obstacles and a cultural headwind that did not exist in earlier periods. The franchise did not create the India-Pakistan conflict, but it has made the cultural soil less hospitable to any peace process that might eventually emerge from the diplomatic work of statecraft.