The most chilling Bollywood spy films are the ones that announce “inspired by true events” because the viewer spends the entire film wondering which parts are real, which parts are dramatized, and whether the truth is actually worse than what the filmmakers dared to show. The tension between intelligence secrecy and cinematic narrative produces a unique storytelling problem that no other genre faces: how do you tell a story when the people who lived it are legally prohibited from confirming it happened, when the government that authorized the operation will neither confirm nor deny its existence, and when the real events may be so sensitive that depicting them accurately could compromise ongoing operations or endanger active operatives? This tension, between the audience’s right to know and the state’s need for secrecy, between the filmmaker’s desire for dramatic truth and the intelligence establishment’s insistence on operational security, is not merely a creative constraint but the subject itself, and the Bollywood films that navigate this tension most honestly are the ones that produce the genre’s most powerful and most lasting work.
Every film discussed in this article announces, in some form, that it is “inspired by true events” or “based on real incidents,” and every film discussed here takes creative liberties with the truth it claims to depict. The question is not whether the films are accurate, they are not, and they cannot be, because the classified nature of intelligence operations means that the complete truth is unavailable to filmmakers, audiences, and in some cases even to the government officials who authorized the operations. The question is what the specific liberties each film takes reveal about the relationship between Indian cinema and Indian intelligence, about what the Indian public is permitted to know about the operations conducted in its name, and about how the creative process of dramatization transforms historical events into cultural mythology that subsequently shapes how the nation understands its own security apparatus, its intelligence capabilities, and the invisible sacrifices that its operatives make in the spaces between what the public knows and what the classified record contains.
The tension between truth and drama is not merely a creative challenge but an epistemological one: the audience of a true-story spy film occupies a position of permanent uncertainty, knowing that some of what they are watching reflects real events but unable to determine which parts are real, which are dramatized, and which are entirely invented. This uncertainty is not a flaw in the genre but its defining characteristic and its primary source of emotional power, and the most accomplished true-story spy films exploit this uncertainty deliberately and skillfully, creating viewing experiences whose emotional power derives specifically and irreplaceably from the audience’s permanent inability to distinguish between documented history and creative invention. When Raazi’s Sehmat marries into a Pakistani military family, the audience’s knowledge that a real woman did something similar gives the fictional scene an emotional weight that a purely fictional scenario could not carry, even though the specific dialogue, the specific staging, and the specific emotional beats are entirely the filmmaker’s creation. The real and the invented become inseparable within the viewing experience, and this inseparability is what makes the true-story spy genre Bollywood’s most fascinating epistemological experiment.
The complete ranking of Bollywood’s best spy thrillers evaluates these films as cinema; this article evaluates them as interpretations of history, examining what really happened, what the films changed, what they invented, and why those changes matter for both the audience’s understanding of Indian intelligence and the genre’s artistic evolution.
The article’s scope encompasses every significant Bollywood film that claims a true-story basis within the spy, intelligence, and covert-operations genres, from the pioneering true-story espionage films of the early 2000s through the genre’s contemporary peak in the Dhurandhar franchise. Films that are purely fictional (the Tiger franchise, the War franchise, the Ek Tha Tiger series) are excluded, as are films whose true-story basis is tangential rather than central (action films that reference real events without depicting specific operations). The films are analyzed individually, with each analysis examining the real events that inspired the film, the specific creative changes the filmmakers made, the ethical implications of those changes, and the film’s contribution to the public’s understanding of Indian intelligence operations. The analysis also examines the four major thematic dimensions that distinguish the true-story spy genre from the fictional spy genre: the truth-to-fiction pipeline (how real operations become films), the ethics of depicting classified events (the responsibilities filmmakers owe to their subjects), the intelligence community’s relationship with cinema (the paradox of institutional invisibility and cinematic visibility), and the accuracy-drama spectrum (a five-category framework for evaluating what “based on true events” actually means in each film’s specific case). To explore how these films performed at the box office, the commercial data reveals a consistent pattern: true-story spy films generate stronger audience engagement than purely fictional spy films, suggesting that the “inspired by true events” label functions as both a credibility marker and a commercial asset.
The Truth-to-Fiction Pipeline
The process by which real Indian intelligence operations become Bollywood films involves a chain of intermediaries whose collective work transforms classified events into public entertainment, and understanding this chain is essential for evaluating the accuracy claims that these films make. The chain operates through four distinct stages, each of which introduces interpretive distance from the real events, and the cumulative effect of all four stages is a final cinematic product that bears a relationship to the original intelligence operation that is recognizable but not identical, suggestive but not definitive, and emotionally authentic but factually approximate.
The first link in the chain is the journalist-investigator, the writer whose research into real intelligence events produces the books, articles, and investigative reports that filmmakers use as source material. S. Hussain Zaidi’s books (Black Friday, Dongri to Dubai, Mumbai Avengers, Black Tornado) have provided source material for multiple Bollywood films and have established the journalist-investigator as the essential intermediary between the intelligence community and the entertainment industry. Zaidi’s specific methodology, which involves building relationships with intelligence officials, police officers, and criminal subjects over decades of sustained engagement, produces narratives whose accuracy exceeds what single-project journalism can achieve, and his books’ consistent use as film source material confirms their position as the gold standard of intelligence journalism in India. Harinder Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat, based on his conversations with the real operative’s family over a period of years, provided the basis for Raazi with an emotional authenticity that reflected the depth of his engagement with the family’s experience. R.K. Yadav’s Mission R&AW, a memoir by a former RAW officer that was the first significant insider account of the organization’s operations and culture, has influenced the depiction of intelligence operations in multiple films by providing filmmakers with institutional details that external research cannot replicate.
Aditya Dhar has spoken in interviews about the extensive research process that informed Dhurandhar, which involved consultation with former intelligence officials, study of declassified operational reports, visits to locations associated with the operations that inspired the film, and the development of relationships with the intelligence community that provided ongoing access to institutional knowledge throughout the production process. The Dhurandhar research methodology represents the true-story spy genre’s most ambitious example of filmmaker-intelligence engagement, and the resulting film’s operational specificity, which former intelligence professionals have praised for its authenticity, confirms that the investment in research produces a qualitatively different kind of film than the investment in creative invention alone.
The journalist-investigator occupies a liminal position: they have more access to classified information than the general public (through their sources within the intelligence community) but less access than the operatives themselves, and the gap between what they know and what the operatives experienced is the first layer of interpretive distance between real events and cinematic depiction. This gap is not merely informational but experiential: the journalist knows what happened, but the operative knows what it felt like, and the difference between knowing and feeling is the difference between reporting and art. The best true-story spy films (Raazi, Dhurandhar) bridge this gap by using the journalist’s factual framework to construct the filmmaker’s emotional interpretation, producing a hybrid that is more emotionally authentic than journalism and more factually grounded than fiction.
The second link is the filmmaker, who transforms the journalist’s narrative into a cinematic script. This transformation involves four specific creative operations. Compression reduces decades of real events into a two-to-three-hour narrative, requiring the filmmaker to select which events to include, which to omit, and how to connect the included events into a coherent dramatic arc. Compositing combines multiple real operatives, handlers, targets, and institutional figures into a smaller number of fictional characters whose individual stories carry the narrative weight that the real events distributed across many participants. Invention creates scenes that are dramatically necessary but that have no real-world basis: the specific dialogues, confrontations, romantic encounters, and emotional climaxes that transform a sequence of operational events into a human drama. And omission removes real events that are too sensitive (classified operations whose depiction could compromise national security), too boring (administrative procedures and institutional politics that are operationally significant but dramatically inert), or too complex (multi-year operations whose full scope would require a television series rather than a film) for cinematic treatment. Each of these transformations introduces interpretive distance from the real events, and the cumulative effect of all four is a film that bears a relationship to reality that is analogous to the relationship between a portrait and the person it depicts: recognizable, suggestive, but not identical, and the differences between the portrait and the person reveal as much about the artist’s interpretation as they do about the subject’s reality.
The third link is the state, whose response to the film’s depiction ranges from official silence (the most common response, which allows the film to occupy the space between truth and fiction without either confirming or denying its accuracy) through unofficial cooperation (providing logistical support, technical consultation, or access to military locations and equipment without acknowledging the film’s accuracy) to active opposition (legal challenges, censorship demands, or public criticism that the film is inaccurate or harmful to national security). India has no equivalent of the CIA’s Entertainment Liaison Office, which actively cooperates with Hollywood productions to ensure that the agency’s depiction serves its institutional interests and which reviews scripts before production to identify and remove classified information. The Indian intelligence establishment’s relationship with cinema is more ambiguous and more informal: individual retired officers cooperate with filmmakers on a personal basis, but the institutions themselves (RAW, IB, NIA, NTRO) maintain an official posture of neither confirming nor denying the events that films depict. This ambiguity is itself a creative resource for filmmakers: the state’s refusal to confirm or deny allows the film to claim authenticity without the burden of official verification, and the audience’s uncertainty about what is real and what is invented is the specific emotional texture that “inspired by true events” films exploit.
The fourth and final link in the chain is the audience, whose reception of the film completes the truth-to-fiction pipeline by converting the filmmaker’s creative interpretation into the public’s operational understanding. When millions of viewers watch Uri and process it as “the true story of the surgical strikes,” the film’s creative interpretation replaces the classified operational reality as the public’s default understanding of the event. This replacement is not the filmmaker’s fault or the audience’s weakness; it is the inevitable consequence of depicting classified events in a public medium, because the audience has no access to the classified reality against which to evaluate the cinematic interpretation, and the cinematic version, being the only version available to them, becomes their truth by default. The patriotic cinema analysis examines how this replacement mechanism functions across the broader patriotic genre, and the true-story spy film’s specific contribution to the mechanism is the additional credibility that the “inspired by true events” label provides.
The Films: Every Major Bollywood Spy Film Based on True Events
Raazi (2018) - The Woman Who Married the Enemy
Raazi, directed by Meghna Gulzar and starring Alia Bhatt, is based on the true story of a woman identified in Harinder Sikka’s novel as Sehmat Khan, a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani military family on the instructions of her father and Indian intelligence to provide information about Pakistani military operations during the lead-up to the 1971 war. The real Sehmat reportedly provided intelligence that contributed to the Indian Navy’s successful defense against a Pakistani naval attack on the western coast, information whose strategic value may have altered the war’s outcome in India’s favor.
What the film depicts accurately is the broad outline of the operation: a young Indian woman marrying into a Pakistani military family, establishing herself within the household, accessing military intelligence through her domestic position, and transmitting that intelligence to her Indian handlers. The emotional architecture of the film, the progressive psychological destruction of a woman who must betray people who have accepted her as family, is based on the real Sehmat’s reported experience, though the specific scenes through which this destruction is dramatized are the filmmakers’ invention.
What the film changes is significant. The real Sehmat’s story was denied by the Indian intelligence establishment for decades, and her family’s efforts to secure recognition for her service were rebuffed by the very institutions she had served. The film compresses the timeline of events, composites multiple intelligence contacts into a single handler (Jaideep Ahlawat’s Khalid Mir), and invents specific scenes (the murder of a household servant who discovers Sehmat’s activities) that have no confirmed real-world basis but that serve the dramatic purpose of showing the moral cost of espionage. Gulzar’s specific creative achievement is her refusal to celebrate Sehmat’s service: the film’s final scene, in which an aged Sehmat collapses in grief when confronted with her past, argues that the “real story” is not the intelligence she gathered but the human being she destroyed in the process of gathering it.
The ethical dimensions of Raazi’s “true story” claim are particularly complex because the real Sehmat was alive at the time of the film’s production, and her family’s cooperation with the film was negotiated with sensitivity to their desire for privacy. The spy thriller ranking positions Raazi as the third-finest spy film in Hindi cinema history, and its true-story basis is integral to its emotional impact: the audience’s awareness that a real woman experienced something approximating the horror depicted on screen gives the film a weight that purely fictional espionage narratives cannot replicate.
Dhurandhar (2025) - The Decade in Deep Cover
The Dhurandhar franchise, directed by Aditya Dhar and starring Ranveer Singh, is “inspired by true events” in a more composite and diffuse sense than Raazi’s single-operative basis. The franchise does not depict a single real operation but draws on multiple real events, operations, and intelligence methodologies to construct a narrative that reflects the reality of RAW’s deep-cover operations without depicting any specific classified operation. The complete analysis of how Dhurandhar changed Bollywood examines the franchise’s cultural impact, and the true-story dimension is central to that impact: the audience’s belief that “something like this really happened” gives the franchise its specific emotional power.
The real events that reportedly inspired the franchise include the IC-814 hijacking (1999), the Parliament attack (2001), the 26/11 Mumbai attacks (2008), and multiple RAW operations in Pakistan-administered territory that have been reported in journalistic accounts but never officially confirmed. The franchise’s Lyari setting, which depicts Ranveer Singh’s operative living undercover in Karachi’s most volatile district for a decade, is reportedly based on the reality that RAW has maintained deep-cover operatives in Pakistani territory for extended periods, though the specific individuals, locations, and timelines are classified.
What the franchise invents is the specific narrative: Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s individual story, his relationships within Lyari, the specific intelligence he gathers, and the operational sequences through which the franchise’s action unfolds are all creative constructions rather than depictions of real events. The franchise’s genius is its use of the composite approach: by drawing on multiple real events rather than a single operation, the filmmakers avoid the verification problem (no single operation can be confirmed or denied) while maintaining the emotional authenticity that the “inspired by true events” label provides. The Baloch community’s objections to the franchise’s depiction of Lyari demonstrate the ethical complexity of this approach: the franchise depicts a real place with real residents, and the creative liberties taken with that place’s characterization affect real people’s lives in ways that purely fictional settings do not.
The directorial analysis of Aditya Dhar examines how Dhar’s research methodology, which reportedly involved extensive consultation with former intelligence officials and visits to locations associated with the operations that inspired the franchise, produced a film whose operational specificity convinces the audience of its authenticity even when the specific events depicted are invented. This specificity, the tradecraft details, the operational protocols, the specific challenges of maintaining a deep-cover identity, is what distinguishes Dhurandhar from fictional spy films that invent their operational details without reference to real intelligence practice.
Baby (2015) - The Counter-Terror Black Ops
Neeraj Pandey’s Baby, starring Akshay Kumar, is inspired by multiple Indian counter-terrorism operations without depicting any single real operation, and this deliberate ambiguity is the film’s most significant creative strategy: by refusing to anchor its narrative to a specific classified operation, Baby avoids the verification problem that more specific “true story” films face while maintaining the credibility that the “inspired by real events” label provides. The film’s fictional black-ops unit, which operates outside official channels to neutralize terrorist threats before they can be executed, is reportedly based on the reality that Indian intelligence agencies maintain deniable operational capabilities that are not subject to the same oversight and transparency requirements as conventional military operations. The specific reality behind this fictional premise is that India’s counter-terrorism infrastructure has evolved, since the 1999 IC-814 hijacking and especially since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, into a multi-layered system whose most sensitive operations are conducted by units whose existence is officially unacknowledged and whose methods are designed to be deniable.
The film’s specific operations deserve individual analysis because each draws on real operational methodologies. The extraction of a terrorist operative from a Middle Eastern country, which provides the film’s opening set piece, reflects the real challenge that Indian intelligence faces in operating in Gulf states where diplomatic constraints prevent official military or police action but where terrorist networks maintain operational and financial infrastructure. The operation’s specific details, the use of a cover identity to establish proximity to the target, the coordination between field operatives and headquarters analysts via encrypted communications, the logistical challenge of extracting the target across international borders without official cooperation, reflect real intelligence tradecraft with enough specificity to suggest that the filmmakers’ consultation with retired intelligence officers was substantive rather than superficial.
Pandey’s research process, which reportedly involved extensive conversations with retired intelligence officers over a period of years, produced a film whose procedural specificity distinguishes it from the generic action-spy formula that had dominated Bollywood’s espionage genre before Satya’s Varma revolution transformed the gangster genre. The specific quality that former intelligence professionals have praised in Baby is its depiction of the tedium, the waiting, and the institutional frustration that constitute the majority of intelligence work: the film shows operatives spending hours in surveillance positions, analysts processing raw intelligence that may or may not prove actionable, and commanders making resource-allocation decisions under conditions of incomplete information. These unglamorous realities, which Hollywood spy films typically omit in favor of continuous action, are what give Baby its specific authenticity and what distinguish it from the fictional spy formula that the spy thriller ranking evaluates on entertainment criteria rather than accuracy criteria.
The film’s commercial success (approximately Rs 95 crore India Net against a production budget of approximately Rs 50 crore) confirmed that the “inspired by real operations” approach could generate commercial returns comparable to the fictional spy formula, and its influence on subsequent intelligence films, including Uri and Dhurandhar, is acknowledged by both films’ directors. Pandey’s specific contribution to the true-story spy genre is the demonstration that procedural accuracy and commercial entertainment are not opposing objectives: the film’s most procedurally accurate sequences (the surveillance operations, the intelligence analysis, the operational planning) are also its most dramatically engaging, because the audience’s awareness that “this is how it really works” adds a dimension of tension that purely fictional operations cannot replicate.
Madras Cafe (2013) - The Assassination Investigation
Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe, starring John Abraham, is based on the events surrounding the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1991 and the Indian intelligence operations that preceded it. The film’s specific achievement within the true-story spy genre is its willingness to address a subject, the failure of Indian intelligence to prevent the assassination of a sitting Prime Minister’s successor, that the genre’s more triumphalist entries consistently avoid: Madras Cafe is not a film about intelligence success but about intelligence failure, and the failure’s emotional and political consequences give the film a tragic weight that the genre’s success narratives cannot replicate.
The film depicts a RAW operative’s attempts to navigate the Sri Lankan civil war’s complex politics while gathering intelligence on the LTTE’s operations, and the narrative’s trajectory toward the assassination that the operative cannot prevent creates a tragic structure that distinguishes the film from the genre’s more triumphalist entries. The real events that the film depicts are among the most thoroughly documented in Indian intelligence history: the Indian Peace Keeping Force’s deployment in Sri Lanka (1987-1990), which was intended to enforce a peace agreement but which devolved into a military quagmire that alienated both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government; the LTTE’s evolution from a liberation movement that India had originally supported and trained (a dimension that the film addresses with uncomfortable honesty) into a terrorist organization that targeted the very country that had created it; and the intelligence failures that preceded Gandhi’s assassination, which occurred despite warnings from multiple intelligence sources that the LTTE was planning a retaliatory attack against Indian political leadership.
The film’s creative changes include the invention of the protagonist’s specific identity and experiences (no single RAW operative played the role that John Abraham’s character embodies), the compositing of multiple intelligence operations into a single narrative arc, and the dramatization of the assassination’s aftermath in ways that prioritize emotional impact over historical precision. The directorial analysis of Sircar examines how the director’s characteristic restraint produces a spy film whose emotional power derives from what it refuses to show rather than from what it displays: the assassination itself occurs off-screen, and the audience’s knowledge of what is about to happen transforms every preceding scene into an exercise in dramatic irony whose emotional weight is proportional to the audience’s historical awareness.
The film’s release was controversial: Tamil political organizations objected to the film’s depiction of the LTTE, arguing that the film demonized the Tamil liberation struggle, and the film was banned in some Tamil Nadu theaters. The controversy illustrates the specific risk of “based on true events” spy films that address ongoing political sensitivities: the historical events the film depicts are not merely historical but politically current, and the film’s creative interpretation of those events becomes a political statement regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions. The patriotic cinema analysis examines how Madras Cafe’s treatment of the LTTE complicates the patriotic genre’s typically binary framework by depicting an organization that was simultaneously a liberation movement (from the Tamil perspective), a terrorist organization (from the Indian government’s perspective), and a former Indian intelligence asset (from the historical perspective), and by refusing to resolve these contradictory characterizations into a single moral judgment.
Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran (2018) - The Nuclear Secret
Abhishek Sharma’s Parmanu, starring John Abraham, is based on the 1998 Pokhran-II nuclear tests, in which India conducted a series of nuclear weapons tests that defied international pressure and American satellite surveillance to establish India as a nuclear weapons state. The real operation, code-named Operation Shakti, was one of the most tightly controlled secrets in Indian history: the tests were conducted under conditions of extreme secrecy, with the test preparations disguised to evade American spy satellites that were monitoring the Pokhran test site after detecting signs of test preparations in 1995 (which had forced India to postpone the tests under diplomatic pressure).
The film’s depiction of the cat-and-mouse game between Indian scientists and American surveillance is its most dramatically effective and most historically grounded element. The real operation involved elaborate deception measures that are documented in publicly available accounts: test preparations were conducted at night when the American KH-11 reconnaissance satellites were not overhead, equipment was camouflaged during satellite overpasses, and the test team maintained routine surface activity to prevent the surveillance from detecting anomalies. The specific detail that the Indian team had obtained the orbital schedules of the American surveillance satellites, allowing them to time their preparations to the gaps in satellite coverage, provides the kind of factual thriller detail that fictional screenplays rarely achieve because reality is more dramatically satisfying than invention.
The deception’s success was so complete that the American intelligence community was taken entirely by surprise when India announced the tests on May 11, 1998, and the subsequent political analysis within the American intelligence establishment (which concluded that the failure to detect the preparations was a significant intelligence failure) confirmed the Indian deception operation’s effectiveness. The film dramatizes the nuclear scientists’ emotional reaction to the tests’ success with a patriotic intensity that connects the film to the patriotic cinema tradition: the tests were not merely scientific experiments but acts of national self-assertion that established India’s sovereignty in the nuclear domain and that defied the international nonproliferation regime that India perceived as discriminatory.
The film’s creative changes include the compositing of multiple real individuals into fictional characters (John Abraham’s Ashwat Raina is a composite of several scientists and military officers who participated in the operation), the invention of a specific romantic subplot that has no real-world basis, and the dramatization of internal government debates with more dramatic confrontation than the actual decision-making process reportedly involved. The real decision to test was made by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee within weeks of taking office, and the political process was less contentious than the film’s dramatization suggests, though the scientific and logistical challenges were as formidable as the film depicts. The film’s treatment of the American intelligence failure is its most significant ethical challenge: depicting the Americans as adversaries whose surveillance must be defeated is politically charged in the context of the contemporary US-India strategic partnership, and the film navigates this challenge by treating the Americans as professional competitors whose capabilities must be respected even as they are circumvented, rather than as enemies whose defeat is to be celebrated.
Special 26 (2012) - The Fake Income Tax Raid
Neeraj Pandey’s Special 26, while not a spy film in the traditional sense, merits inclusion because it depicts a real intelligence-adjacent operation whose planning, execution, and evasion of law enforcement required the same operational capabilities, research, social engineering, deception, and real-time adaptation, that espionage demands. The film is based on the 1987 Opera House heist, in which a group of individuals impersonating Income Tax officials conducted a fake raid on a jewelry store in Mumbai, confiscating crores worth of gold and jewelry while the real police and tax authorities were unaware that the operation was fraudulent. The real case was never fully solved, and several of the perpetrators were never identified, giving the film its specific narrative hook: the audience knows from the beginning that the protagonists are criminals, and the film’s tension derives from whether they will be caught rather than whether they will succeed.
Akshay Kumar’s Ajay Singh leads the heist team with a professional discipline that mirrors the real operation’s reported efficiency. The film’s most significant true-story element is its depiction of the impersonation’s sophistication: the perpetrators did not merely wear uniforms and flash fake badges but understood the procedural details of a real tax raid well enough to convince the targets that the operation was legitimate. This understanding required research (studying how real tax raids are conducted), social engineering (creating plausible cover identities that could withstand initial scrutiny), and operational discipline (maintaining the deception under the stress of real-time execution), all of which are core intelligence capabilities. The gangster film analysis examines the overlap between the crime and intelligence genres, and Special 26 occupies the precise intersection where criminal ingenuity and intelligence tradecraft become indistinguishable.
Anupam Kher’s CBI officer Waseem Khan, who pursues the heist team with a methodical intelligence that matches their operational sophistication, provides the film’s investigative dimension and creates a cat-and-mouse dynamic that mirrors the structure of counter-intelligence operations: the investigator must think like the criminal to anticipate the criminal’s next move, and the gap between the investigator’s analysis and the criminal’s execution is the space in which the drama unfolds. The film’s twist ending, which reveals that the heist team’s final operation is not a crime but a sting operation designed to expose corrupt officials, transforms the entire narrative’s moral framework and demonstrates Pandey’s characteristic ability to construct narratives whose final revelation recontextualizes everything that preceded it.
Romeo Akbar Walter (2019) - The Cold War Operative
Robbie Grewal’s Romeo Akbar Walter (RAW), starring John Abraham, is loosely based on real RAW operations during the 1971 war period, though the specific operative and operations depicted are largely fictionalized. The film’s title, which uses the NATO phonetic alphabet to spell “RAW,” signals its institutional focus, and the film’s most significant contribution to the true-story spy genre is its depiction of the institutional culture of Indian intelligence during the Cold War era: the recruitment methods (which reportedly involved identifying potential operatives through their civilian activities and approaching them through intermediaries), the training protocols (which included the construction of complete cover identities with supporting documentation, backstories, and behavioral training), the management of agents in hostile territory (the isolation, the communications protocols, the dead drops and coded messages), and the institutional willingness to deny and discard operatives who are compromised.
The film’s most significant truth-claim is its depiction of the human cost of institutional deniability: when the operative is captured by Pakistani intelligence, RAW denies his existence, and the film argues that this deniability, which protects the institution, destroys the individual who served it. Abraham’s performance communicates the specific loneliness of the deep-cover operative: a man whose real identity has been erased, whose cover identity is his only social connection, and whose capture reveals that the institution he sacrificed everything for will not acknowledge that he exists. This argument, which connects RAW to Raazi and to the patriotic cinema tradition’s examination of invisible sacrifice, reflects a real dimension of intelligence work that the industry’s more triumphalist films prefer to ignore: the intelligence community’s institutional survival depends on its ability to deny the operations that go wrong, and this ability requires a willingness to abandon the operatives who conducted those operations, a willingness that is ethically devastating but institutionally necessary.
Bellbottom (2021) - The Hijacking Response
Ranjit M. Tewari’s Bellbottom, starring Akshay Kumar, is based on the real hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-812 in 1984, in which a group of Sikh separatists hijacked an Indian Airlines flight and diverted it to Lahore. The real operation, in which Indian intelligence agents disguised as cleaners boarded the aircraft during its stop in Lahore and eventually facilitated the passengers’ rescue, is one of the lesser-known but most operationally impressive counter-hijacking operations in Indian intelligence history. The operation’s success was achieved through a combination of quick thinking, improvisation, and the exploitation of the Pakistani airport’s security gaps, and the real operatives’ ability to board the aircraft under the guise of routine airport services demonstrates the specific kind of creative problem-solving that intelligence work demands and that purely military operations do not typically require.
The film takes substantial creative liberties with the real events, including changing the time period (from 1984 to 1971), inventing a fictional Prime Minister (played by Lara Dutta in a prosthetics-heavy portrayal of Indira Gandhi), inventing a fictional intelligence chief, and dramatizing the rescue operation with more Hollywood-style action than the real operation reportedly involved. The creative changes reveal the filmmaker’s priorities: the historical accuracy of the specific event is subordinated to the creation of an entertaining spy thriller that uses the real operation’s concept (intelligence operatives infiltrating a hijacked aircraft through deception rather than force) as a dramatic premise rather than as a historical narrative.
The film’s true-story basis provides the commercial and credibility benefits of the “inspired by real events” label while the creative changes provide the entertainment value that the real operation’s relatively quiet resolution might not have generated in cinematic form. The box office analysis notes that Bellbottom’s commercial performance was modest (approximately Rs 31 crore India Net, affected by the pandemic-era theatrical constraints), but the film’s contribution to the true-story spy genre is its demonstration that India’s intelligence history contains counter-hijacking operations whose dramatic potential rivals the fictional scenarios that Hollywood has made famous.
Phantom (2015) - The Hunt That Never Happened
Kabir Khan’s Phantom, based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s novel Mumbai Avengers, depicts a fictional Indian intelligence operation to assassinate the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The film’s specific creative premise, that India conducted retaliatory assassinations against the Pakistan-based terrorists who planned the attacks, has no confirmed real-world basis and occupies the specific “inspired by true events” space of depicting an operation that the audience wishes had happened rather than an operation that actually did. The film’s inclusion in this analysis is warranted because it occupies a unique position within the genre: it uses the “true story” framework not to depict what happened but to dramatize what could have happened, and the audience’s emotional engagement with the fictional operation reflects their real-world frustration with the absence of the real operation that the fiction substitutes for.
The real events that provide the film’s emotional foundation, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, are thoroughly documented, and the film’s depiction of the attacks’ aftermath, the grief, the rage, and the institutional paralysis that followed, reflects the genuine emotional experience of the Indian public. The Pakistani masterminds of the attacks (particularly Hafiz Saeed and the Lashkar-e-Taiba leadership) remained free despite overwhelming evidence of their involvement, and the film dramatizes the wish-fulfillment that the intelligence community was unable to provide: what would it look like if India had the political will and the operational capability to reach across the border and eliminate the people responsible for 26/11? The Kabir Khan directorial analysis examines how Khan’s compassionate approach to geopolitical subjects typically produces empathetic narratives, and Phantom represents the exception: a Khan film driven by anger rather than compassion, by the desire for retribution rather than the desire for connection.
Neerja (2016) - The Flight Attendant’s Sacrifice
Ram Madhvani’s Neerja, while technically a hijacking drama rather than a spy film, merits inclusion because it depicts a real intelligence-adjacent event whose emotional and operational dimensions overlap with the spy genre’s concerns about courage under extreme pressure, split-second decision-making with life-or-death consequences, and the specific kind of individual heroism that intelligence work demands. The film is based on the real hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 at Karachi airport in 1986 by Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization terrorists, and the heroism of flight attendant Neerja Bhanot, who saved hundreds of passengers by hiding their American passports (the terrorists were targeting Americans), alerting the cockpit crew to evacuate the aircraft, and opening emergency doors to enable passenger escape when the terrorists began shooting. Bhanot was shot and killed while shielding children from gunfire, and she was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award.
Sonam Kapoor’s Neerja achieves the specific emotional quality that distinguishes the best true-story films: the audience’s knowledge that the real Neerja died transforms every scene of courage into an exercise in anticipated grief, and the film’s power is proportional to the audience’s investment in a life that they know will end. The performance’s specific achievement is its depiction of ordinary courage: Neerja is not trained for combat, is not prepared for terrorism, and does not possess the operational skills that the spy genre’s professional operatives deploy. Her courage is improvised, instinctive, and motivated by the specific human compassion that professional training sometimes replaces with operational detachment. The film’s accuracy is high by “inspired by true events” standards: the broad sequence of events, the specific acts of heroism, and the tragic conclusion all reflect the documented historical record with reasonable fidelity, and the film’s creative embellishments (the flashback structure, the depiction of Neerja’s personal life) serve to humanize the real person rather than to dramatize events that are already sufficiently dramatic.
Airlift (2016) - The Civilian Rescue
Raja Krishna Menon’s Airlift, starring Akshay Kumar, is based on the real evacuation of over 170,000 Indian citizens from Kuwait during the 1990 Iraqi invasion, an operation that the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes as the largest civilian evacuation in history. The real operation’s scale and logistical complexity provide a natural dramatic architecture that requires minimal creative embellishment: the coordination of hundreds of Air India flights over a period of weeks, the negotiation with Iraqi occupation authorities for safe passage, the management of thousands of terrified civilians in a war zone, and the logistical challenge of transporting 170,000 people across international borders under combat conditions all provide dramatic material that exceeds the fictional scenarios that Hollywood evacuation films typically construct.
The film’s most significant creative change is the centralization of the narrative around a single fictional protagonist (Kumar’s Ranjit Katyal) whose leadership drives the evacuation. The real operation was conducted by the Indian Embassy, Air India, and multiple government agencies working in coordination, and no single individual played the heroic role that the film assigns to Katyal. The compositing of this institutional achievement into a personal narrative is the most common creative change in “based on true events” filmmaking, and it reveals the genre’s fundamental tension: the audience engages more emotionally with individual characters than with institutional processes, but the real story is institutional rather than individual, and the creative decision to individualize the narrative inevitably distorts the institutional reality.
Kumar’s performance as Katyal provides the audience with the emotional anchor that the institutional narrative cannot: a man whose initial selfishness (he plans to evacuate himself and his family while leaving the broader Indian community behind) is transformed by the crisis into selfless leadership, and the transformation arc, while dramatically effective, has no confirmed real-world basis. The patriotic cinema analysis examines Airlift’s patriotic dimensions and its contribution to the civic-patriotism model that treats bureaucratic competence and humanitarian commitment as patriotic virtues equal in significance to military courage.
The Ethics of “Inspired by True Events”
The ethical challenges of “based on true events” spy filmmaking are more acute than in any other genre because the subjects of spy films, intelligence operatives, their families, the communities in which they operated, and the governments that authorized their operations, are real people whose lives are affected by the cinematic depiction of their experiences. The ethical landscape is further complicated by the classified nature of the subject: unlike “based on true events” films in other genres (biopics, sports dramas, historical epics), where the truth is publicly available and the audience can evaluate the film’s accuracy against the historical record, spy films depict events whose truth is officially unknowable, and the audience’s inability to verify the film’s claims gives the filmmaker unusual power to shape public perception without accountability.
The living-subject problem is the most immediate ethical challenge. Raazi’s real subject was alive at the time of the film’s production, and the filmmakers negotiated with her family for permission to tell her story. The negotiation required balancing the family’s desire for privacy and dignity with the filmmaker’s desire for dramatic truth, and the result was a film that honored the real Sehmat’s experience without exploiting it. Gulzar’s specific ethical decisions, including the choice not to reveal the real operative’s identity in the film’s marketing, the choice to depict the psychological cost of espionage rather than celebrating its triumphs, and the choice to end the film with Sehmat’s grief rather than with the nation’s gratitude, all reflect a filmmaker’s ethical sensitivity to the living subject’s humanity. The contrast with other “based on true events” spy films that treat their subjects with less sensitivity reveals that ethical filmmaking is a choice, not a constraint, and that the best true-story spy films are the ones that make the ethical choice even when the commercially expedient choice would be to exploit the subject’s suffering for dramatic spectacle.
The Dhurandhar franchise faces a different version of the living-subject problem: the franchise’s composite approach means that no single real operative is depicted, but the communities depicted (Lyari’s residents, Baloch political groups) are real communities whose characterization in the film affects how they are perceived by millions of viewers. The Baloch community’s objections to the franchise’s depiction demonstrate that the “composite” approach does not eliminate the living-subject problem but displaces it from individuals to communities, and the community-level impact may be more significant than the individual-level impact because communities cannot negotiate with filmmakers in the way that individuals and families can. The ethical question that the Baloch objections raise is whether the creative freedom to depict a real community in a fictional context carries an obligation to depict that community accurately, or whether the “inspired by true events” label provides sufficient creative license to characterize the community in ways that serve the narrative rather than reflecting the community’s self-understanding.
The state-ambiguity problem adds another layer of ethical complexity. When the Indian government neither confirms nor denies the events that a film depicts, the film occupies a space of permanent uncertainty that the audience cannot resolve. The audience does not know whether the events are real (in which case the film is a tribute to the operatives who conducted them), partially real (in which case the film is a creative interpretation that blurs the line between tribute and fiction), or entirely invented (in which case the “inspired by true events” label is a marketing device that exploits the audience’s credulity). This uncertainty is not resolved by the film’s disclaimer text (which typically announces that the film is a “work of fiction” inspired by real events), because the disclaimer’s legal function (protecting the filmmaker from accuracy challenges) contradicts the marketing function of the “true story” label (convincing the audience that the events are real), and the audience processes both signals simultaneously without the information necessary to determine which is more accurate. The result is a permanent epistemological fog in which the audience believes the film is “mostly true” without any basis for determining which parts are true and which are invented, and this fog serves both the filmmaker’s commercial interests (the “true story” label generates audience engagement) and the state’s institutional interests (the ambiguity prevents the film from being treated as either official confirmation or official denial of the events depicted).
The family-objection problem occurs when the families of real operatives object to the film’s depiction of their relatives. The real Sehmat’s family reportedly cooperated with Raazi’s production but expressed concerns about specific creative choices that they felt did not accurately reflect their relative’s experience. Other families have been less cooperative: the families of operatives depicted in Romeo Akbar Walter and other films have reportedly objected to dramatizations that they consider inaccurate or disrespectful. The filmmaker’s ethical obligation to the real family is in tension with the creative obligation to produce a compelling film, and the resolution of this tension varies by filmmaker, by family, and by the specific nature of the objection. The most ethically responsible approach, demonstrated by Gulzar in Raazi, involves sustained consultation with the family throughout the production process, genuine responsiveness to the family’s concerns, and a willingness to modify creative choices when the family’s objections reflect legitimate dignity interests rather than mere discomfort with the public exposure of private experiences.
The broader ethical question that all “inspired by true events” spy films must confront is whether the public’s right to know about the operations conducted in its name outweighs the intelligence community’s right to operational secrecy, and whether cinematic dramatization serves the public interest by bringing these operations into public discourse or harms the public interest by substituting dramatic reconstruction for factual truth. The honest answer is that it does both: the films inform the public about the general nature of intelligence operations while misinforming them about the specific details, and the net effect on public understanding depends on whether the audience processes the films as educational (learning about how intelligence operations work) or as entertainment (experiencing the dramatic pleasures of the spy genre) or as both simultaneously (which is the most realistic description of how the audience actually engages with these films).
The Intelligence Community and Cinema
India’s intelligence community, comprising RAW (external intelligence), the Intelligence Bureau (domestic intelligence), the National Technical Research Organisation (signals intelligence), the Defence Intelligence Agency (military intelligence), and the National Investigation Agency (counter-terrorism investigation), maintains an official posture of institutional invisibility that is at odds with the visibility that cinematic depiction provides. Unlike the CIA, which maintains an Entertainment Liaison Office that actively cooperates with Hollywood productions to shape the agency’s public image, and unlike MI5 and MI6, which have embraced limited public engagement through official websites and authorized histories, Indian intelligence agencies have no formal mechanism for cooperating with filmmakers, and the cooperation that does occur is unofficial, deniable, and conducted through retired officers rather than through institutional channels.
The informal cooperation takes several forms that merit individual analysis. The first form is the consultant relationship, in which retired intelligence officers serve as paid or unpaid advisors to film productions, providing operational details, procedural accuracy checks, and narrative guidance that the filmmakers could not obtain through open-source research. These consultants occupy a grey zone: they share information that is based on their professional experience but that may touch on classified operations, and the boundary between sharing general institutional knowledge (which is permissible under India’s Official Secrets Act) and sharing specific classified information (which is not) is difficult to determine and impossible to enforce once the information has been shared with filmmakers. The consultant relationship is the primary mechanism through which Bollywood spy films achieve their operational specificity, and the quality of the consultation directly determines the quality of the resulting film’s authentic texture: films whose consultants provided sustained, detailed, and operationally specific guidance (Baby, Dhurandhar) achieve a level of authenticity that films whose consultants provided only general institutional color (Bellbottom, Romeo Akbar Walter) do not.
The second form is the location-access relationship, in which the military or intelligence establishment provides filmmakers with access to military bases, training facilities, and equipment that the production could not otherwise obtain. Uri’s production reportedly received access to military locations and equipment that enhanced the film’s visual authenticity, and the military’s willingness to provide this access reflects an institutional recognition that films depicting the military favorably generate public support for military operations and military funding. The access is not unconditional: the military maintains editorial preferences (positive depiction of the institution, no classified information, no depiction of identifiable current personnel) that the filmmakers must accommodate in exchange for the access, creating a transactional relationship in which the military provides production value and the filmmaker provides positive publicity.
The third form is the institutional non-response, in which the intelligence establishment responds to a film’s release with official silence that is itself a form of communication. When RAW does not object to a film’s depiction of its operations, the silence can be interpreted as tacit approval (the film’s depiction is sufficiently inaccurate that it does not compromise real operations) or as strategic tolerance (the film’s positive depiction of the agency serves the agency’s institutional interests). When the intelligence establishment does respond to a film, as it reportedly did when certain films depicted operational details with uncomfortable specificity, the response is typically conveyed through informal channels (a call from a retired officer to the filmmaker, a suggestion from a government contact) rather than through official action, maintaining the fiction of institutional non-engagement while effectively shaping the film’s content.
The directorial analysis notes that directors like Aditya Dhar and Neeraj Pandey have built relationships with the intelligence community that provide their films with a level of operational specificity that distinguishes them from filmmakers who rely entirely on open-source research. These relationships are built over years of sustained engagement, beginning with initial introductions through published journalists and retired officers, developing through repeated meetings that establish trust and demonstrate the filmmaker’s commitment to responsible depiction, and culminating in the kind of sustained production consultation that gives films like Dhurandhar and Baby their specific authenticity. The relationship-building process is itself a form of intelligence tradecraft: the filmmaker must establish trust with sources who are professionally suspicious, must demonstrate that the resulting film will serve rather than harm the institution’s interests, and must navigate the tension between the creative desire for dramatic truth and the institutional desire for positive depiction, all of which are skills that the intelligence operative’s own work requires.
The intelligence community’s unofficial relationship with cinema serves institutional interests even as the institution officially denies the relationship’s existence. Films that depict Indian intelligence agencies as competent, professional, and effective (Uri, Dhurandhar, Baby) generate public support for intelligence operations and intelligence funding, create recruitment interest among young viewers who are inspired by the cinematic depiction of intelligence work, and provide the institution with a public narrative about its capabilities that the institution’s official silence prevents it from constructing directly. The agencies’ institutional interest in these benefits creates an incentive for informal cooperation that the institution’s official posture of invisibility would prohibit, producing a paradox that is itself characteristic of the intelligence world: an institution that officially does not exist in the public sphere benefits from public depictions that it officially does not participate in creating.
Accuracy vs Drama: How to Watch “Based on True Events” Critically
The informed viewer of “based on true events” spy films needs a framework for evaluating accuracy claims that is more nuanced than the binary of “true” or “false,” because the classified nature of intelligence operations means that the complete truth is unavailable to anyone outside the operational chain, and the filmmaker’s creative interpretation occupies a space between fiction and history that requires its own evaluative criteria. The framework proposed here identifies five categories of truth-claims that spy films make, each with different implications for how the audience should process the information the film provides, and the application of these categories to the films discussed in this article reveals that the question “Is this film true?” is less productive than the question “In what specific ways is this film true, and in what specific ways does it depart from truth for dramatic purposes?”
The first category is operational framework truth: the film accurately depicts the type of operation (deep-cover insertion, counter-hijacking, nuclear testing, counter-terrorism) that was really conducted, even if the specific characters, timelines, and events are invented. This is the weakest form of truth-claim but also the most defensible, because operational frameworks (how deep-cover operations work, how counter-hijacking is conducted, how nuclear tests are concealed from satellite surveillance) are institutional knowledge rather than classified information, and filmmakers can depict them accurately without compromising specific operations. Dhurandhar’s operational framework truth is high: RAW really does conduct deep-cover operations in hostile territory, and the film’s depiction of the methodology, challenges, and psychological costs of such operations reflects genuine intelligence practice even though the specific operation depicted is fictional. Baby’s operational framework truth is similarly high: the film’s depiction of inter-agency coordination, field operations, and counter-terrorism methodology has been praised by former intelligence professionals for its procedural accuracy.
The second category is historical-event truth: the film accurately depicts a real historical event (the 1971 war, the surgical strikes, the Pokhran tests, the 1993 bombings) as the context for its narrative. Uri’s historical-event truth is high: the surgical strikes really happened, the Uri attack that provoked them really happened, and the film’s depiction of the political context is consistent with the publicly available record. Parmanu’s historical-event truth is high: the Pokhran-II tests really happened, the American satellite surveillance was real, and the deception measures depicted in the film are documented in public accounts.
The third category is character truth: the film accurately depicts a real person’s experience, including their emotional responses, their relationships, and their psychological trajectory. Raazi’s character truth is moderate: the broad outline of the real Sehmat’s experience is reflected in the film, but the specific scenes, dialogues, emotional beats, and relationship dynamics are the filmmakers’ invention, informed by the source novel’s engagement with the family’s testimony but not constrained by the documentary record.
The fourth category is institutional truth: the film accurately depicts how intelligence institutions operate, including their internal culture, their decision-making processes, their inter-agency dynamics, and their relationship with the political leadership. Baby’s institutional truth is reportedly high: the film’s depiction of the operational chain of command, the relationship between field operatives and headquarters analysts, and the political dynamics that constrain intelligence decision-making have been praised by former intelligence professionals. Dhurandhar’s institutional truth is enhanced by the franchise’s depiction of inter-agency rivalry, political interference in intelligence operations, and the institutional culture of secrecy that shapes every dimension of intelligence work.
The fifth category is emotional truth: the film accurately depicts what the experience of intelligence work feels like, even if the specific events are invented. This is the category that matters most to the audience and that the best “based on true events” spy films achieve most consistently, because emotional truth transcends the factual limitations that classification imposes. The psychological cost of deception (Raazi), the adrenaline and terror of operational execution (Uri), the loneliness and identity erosion of deep cover (Dhurandhar), the moral compromise of institutional service (Baby), and the grief of operations that end in failure (Madras Cafe) all achieve emotional truth that resonates with viewers regardless of whether the specific events depicted are factually accurate. The emotional truth is what gives the true-story spy genre its specific power: the audience may not know which events are real, but they believe that the feelings are real, and this belief in the emotional authenticity of the depicted experience is what distinguishes the true-story spy film from the fictional spy film and what gives the genre its unique capacity for connecting the audience to the invisible sacrifices that intelligence work demands.
The practical application of this five-category framework to the films discussed in this article produces a more nuanced understanding of what “based on true events” means in each case and enables the audience to engage with the films’ truth-claims with the analytical sophistication that the subject deserves. The audience that watches Uri understanding that its operational framework truth and historical-event truth are high but its character truth is low is better equipped to evaluate the film’s patriotic claims than the audience that processes the entire film as either “true” or “fiction.” The framework does not diminish the films’ emotional impact but enriches it, because understanding what is real and what is invented in each film adds a dimension of intellectual engagement that complements the emotional engagement the films provide.
The Stories Still Waiting to Be Told
The classified archives of Indian intelligence contain operations whose dramatic potential exceeds anything that Bollywood has yet depicted, and the progressive declassification of Cold War-era operations is creating a pipeline of stories that future filmmakers will inevitably adapt. The untold stories represent not merely creative opportunities but cultural obligations: the operatives who conducted these operations deserve the same public recognition that the operatives depicted in Raazi, Uri, and Dhurandhar have received, and cinematic adaptation may be the only mechanism through which that recognition can be provided within the constraints of institutional secrecy.
The Kahuta operation, in which Indian intelligence reportedly attempted to sabotage Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program at the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, is among the most dramatically promising untold stories. The operation’s reported scope, which may have involved the insertion of agents into Pakistan’s nuclear establishment, the recruitment of Pakistani scientists as intelligence sources, and the attempted disruption of the centrifuge technology that enabled Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, provides a natural three-act structure that any screenwriter would recognize: the recruitment of the agent (Act 1), the intelligence gathering and sabotage attempts (Act 2), and the operation’s conclusion, whether success, failure, or the ambiguous outcome that real intelligence operations often produce (Act 3). The story’s dramatic potential is enhanced by the real-world stakes: the Kahuta program ultimately succeeded in producing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, which means that the intelligence operation, if it occurred, either failed or was insufficient to prevent the program’s completion, giving the story a tragic dimension that the genre’s triumphalist entries cannot replicate.
The Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of KGB documents smuggled out of Russia by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, contains information about Soviet intelligence operations in India during the Cold War, including the recruitment of Indian politicians, journalists, and intelligence officials as Soviet agents of influence. The dramatization of Soviet penetration of Indian institutions during the Cold War would provide a spy narrative whose moral complexity (the agents believed they were serving progressive ideals rather than betraying India) and institutional sensitivity (some of the individuals identified in the archive have never been publicly named in India) would challenge any filmmaker’s creative and ethical capabilities. The story’s specific dramatic potential lies in the Cold War’s moral ambiguity: the Soviet agents were not traitors in the simple sense (they did not serve an enemy power in the way that a spy for Pakistan would) but collaborators with a superpower whose ideology many Indians genuinely shared, and the question of whether their cooperation constituted patriotism (advancing progressive values) or betrayal (serving foreign interests at the expense of Indian sovereignty) is exactly the kind of moral complexity that the true-story spy genre’s best films engage with.
The RAW operations in East Pakistan during the lead-up to the 1971 war, which reportedly included the training and arming of Bengali resistance fighters (the Mukti Bahini) and the insertion of intelligence operatives into Pakistani military installations, provide the most dramatically promising and cinematically complete untold story in Indian intelligence history: the operations contributed to the creation of a new nation (Bangladesh), making them among the most consequential intelligence operations in any country’s history. The story’s scope, which encompasses the political decision to support Bengali independence, the logistical challenge of training and equipping a guerrilla force across an international border, the intelligence operations that provided the Indian military with the information necessary to plan the decisive December 1971 campaign, and the human cost of the Bengali genocide that preceded the war, would require either a multi-part film (on the Dhurandhar model) or a streaming series (on The Family Man model) to accommodate its full complexity.
The counter-intelligence operations against Chinese intelligence in India represent the most contemporary and most politically sensitive untold story. India’s intelligence establishment has reportedly detected and disrupted multiple Chinese intelligence operations targeting Indian military technology, nuclear programs, and political leadership, and the specific tradecraft of these operations, which reportedly involves cyber intelligence, social engineering, and the exploitation of India’s diaspora networks in China, represents a dimension of intelligence work (the cyber and SIGINT dimensions) that the genre has not yet addressed with the specificity it deserves. The spy thriller ranking notes that the genre’s current focus on Pakistan-centric operations, while commercially reliable, excludes the China dimension of Indian intelligence that may be more strategically significant in the twenty-first century.
The 1965 war intelligence operations, which reportedly included the detection of Pakistan’s Operation Gibraltar (the infiltration of armed combatants into Indian-administered Kashmir to foment an insurgency) and the subsequent intelligence coordination that enabled India’s military response, provide a story whose political dimensions are less sensitive than the Pakistan-centric operations of subsequent decades because the 1965 war is sufficiently historical to have lost its political immediacy. The story’s specific dramatic potential lies in the intelligence failure that preceded the intelligence success: India was initially caught off guard by Operation Gibraltar, and the subsequent intelligence recovery, which detected and dismantled the infiltration network, provides a narrative arc (from failure through adaptation to success) that is more dramatically interesting than the unbroken-success narratives that the genre’s triumphalist films typically construct.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is Raazi based on a true story?
Raazi is based on Harinder Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat, which is itself based on the true story of a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani military family to spy for Indian intelligence during the 1971 war. The real operative’s identity was concealed for decades, and her family cooperated with the novel and film to ensure that her story was told with dignity. The film’s broad outline (the marriage, the intelligence gathering, the psychological cost) reflects the real experience, while the specific scenes and dialogues are the filmmakers’ creative constructions.
Q: Is Dhurandhar based on a true story?
Dhurandhar is “inspired by true events” in a composite sense: the franchise draws on multiple real intelligence operations, geopolitical events (IC-814 hijacking, Parliament attack, 26/11), and RAW operational methodologies to construct a narrative that reflects the reality of deep-cover intelligence work without depicting any single classified operation. The franchise’s Lyari setting and decade-long undercover premise are reportedly based on the reality that RAW maintains deep-cover operatives in Pakistan, though the specific individual and events are fictional.
Q: Is Uri based on a true story?
Uri is based on the real 2016 surgical strikes, in which Indian special forces crossed the Line of Control to destroy terrorist launch pads in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The broad operational framework, including the political authorization, the planning process, and the execution, is consistent with publicly available accounts. The specific characters, personal narratives, and dramatic details are fictional constructions designed to provide emotional engagement.
Q: Is Baby based on real events?
Baby is inspired by multiple Indian counter-terrorism operations without depicting any single real operation. The film’s fictional black-ops unit and its specific missions are creative constructions, but the operational methodology, the tradecraft, and the institutional dynamics are reportedly based on real intelligence practices. Director Neeraj Pandey has stated in interviews that the film’s research involved extensive conversations with retired intelligence officers.
Q: How accurate are Bollywood spy films based on true stories?
Accuracy varies significantly across the spectrum. The most accurate films (Uri, Parmanu) depict real events with reasonable fidelity to the publicly available record while inventing personal narratives for dramatic purposes. The moderately accurate films (Raazi, Baby) depict real operational methodologies and emotional realities while inventing specific events and characters. The least accurate films (Phantom, Bellbottom) use real events as departure points for largely fictional narratives. No Bollywood spy film achieves complete accuracy because the classified nature of intelligence operations means that the complete truth is unavailable to filmmakers.
Q: Why does India have no CIA-style Hollywood liaison office for intelligence films?
India’s intelligence agencies maintain a culture of institutional invisibility that is more extreme than the CIA’s, which has embraced limited public engagement as a recruitment and public-relations tool. The Indian intelligence establishment’s official position is that it does not exist in the public sphere, and formal cooperation with filmmakers would contradict this position. The unofficial cooperation that occurs through retired officers provides the benefits of cinematic engagement while maintaining the institutional fiction of invisibility.
Q: Which Bollywood spy film is the most historically accurate?
Neerja is arguably the most historically accurate, because the events it depicts (the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking) are thoroughly documented through survivor testimony, official investigations, and journalistic reporting, leaving less room for creative invention. Among the intelligence-specific films, Uri is the most accurate in depicting a confirmed military operation, while Raazi is the most accurate in depicting a specific operative’s experience.
Q: How do filmmakers research real intelligence operations for movies?
Filmmakers research real intelligence operations through multiple channels: published books and journalistic investigations (S. Hussain Zaidi’s works, R.K. Yadav’s memoirs), interviews with retired intelligence officers (who share institutional knowledge without revealing classified details), consultation with military and intelligence advisors, visits to locations associated with real operations, and study of declassified documents and publicly available intelligence assessments. The research process is limited by the classified nature of the subject: filmmakers can learn about operational methodologies and institutional culture but cannot access the specific details of classified operations.
Q: What is the difference between “based on” and “inspired by” true events?
“Based on true events” implies a closer relationship to the historical record, suggesting that the film’s narrative broadly follows the real events with creative embellishments. “Inspired by true events” implies a looser relationship, suggesting that the film uses real events as a departure point for a largely creative narrative. In practice, the distinction is often more legal than creative: “inspired by” provides greater legal protection against accuracy challenges, while “based on” provides greater marketing credibility. Most Bollywood spy films use “inspired by” to maintain creative flexibility while benefiting from the credibility that the true-story label provides.
Q: Are there any Bollywood spy films that intelligence professionals consider accurate?
Baby has been specifically praised by former intelligence professionals for its depiction of operational methodology and institutional culture. Uri has been praised by military professionals for its depiction of special forces operations. Dhurandhar has been praised for its depiction of the psychological dimensions of deep-cover work. The praise is always qualified: professionals note that all films take creative liberties, but the best films capture the “feel” of intelligence work even when the specific events are invented.
Q: How has the “based on true events” trend affected Bollywood spy filmmaking?
The trend has elevated the genre’s production standards by requiring filmmakers to invest in research, consultation, and operational accuracy that purely fictional spy films do not demand. The trend has also expanded the genre’s emotional range by grounding the fantastical elements of spy fiction in the psychological reality of actual intelligence work. The commercial success of Raazi, Uri, and Dhurandhar has confirmed that the “true events” label generates audience engagement that exceeds what fictional spy films achieve, encouraging future filmmakers to invest in the research and consultation that the label requires.
Q: What real Indian intelligence operations could become future Bollywood films?
The most cinematically promising untold operations include the Kahuta sabotage operation (against Pakistan’s nuclear program), the Mukti Bahini training operation (which contributed to Bangladesh’s creation), the Mitrokhin Archive revelations (Soviet penetration of Indian institutions), the ongoing counter-intelligence operations against Chinese intelligence in India, and the cyber-intelligence operations that constitute the twenty-first century’s primary intelligence battlefield. Each of these subjects provides dramatic material that exceeds anything the genre has yet attempted. To explore how spy films have performed commercially, the data suggests that the audience appetite for true-story intelligence content is growing, creating commercial incentives for filmmakers to explore these untold stories.
Q: How do “based on true events” spy films affect public understanding of intelligence operations?
The films shape public understanding significantly, often becoming the audience’s default framework for understanding events whose classified nature prevents verification. Uri’s depiction of the surgical strikes has become the public’s primary understanding of how the operation was conducted, replacing the actual operational details (which remain classified) with a cinematic reconstruction. Raazi’s depiction of intelligence honey traps has shaped public understanding of how human intelligence operations work. Dhurandhar’s depiction of deep-cover operations has become the reference point for public discussions about RAW’s capabilities. The influence is powerful but potentially misleading: the cinematic versions are dramatic reconstructions that prioritize entertainment over accuracy, and the audience’s inability to verify the real events means that the cinematic version becomes the de facto truth.
Q: Why are John Abraham and Akshay Kumar the most frequent stars of true-story spy films?
Both actors have cultivated patriotic-action personas that align with the true-story spy genre’s commercial requirements. Abraham (Madras Cafe, Parmanu, Romeo Akbar Walter, Attack) brings a physical intensity and earnest sincerity that communicates the operative’s commitment. Kumar (Baby, Airlift, Bellbottom) brings a commercial reliability and patriotic brand identity that reduces the financial risk of true-story productions. Both actors’ willingness to subordinate their star personas to the historical narrative (Abraham in Madras Cafe, Kumar in Airlift) has made them the genre’s most trusted commercial vehicles.
Q: How do censorship and classification constraints affect true-story spy films?
Censorship operates at multiple levels: the CBFC reviews the film’s content for objectionable material (violence, language, political sensitivity); the Ministry of Defence may review the film for classified information or inaccurate military depiction; and the Intelligence Bureau may take interest in films that depict intelligence operations with concerning specificity. The constraints are not always formal: filmmakers may self-censor sensitive content to avoid the delays and costs associated with official review, creating a chilling effect that is more influential than the formal censorship process. The box office records analysis notes that the A-certificate (adults only) that most serious spy films receive restricts their audience but provides creative freedom that the more commercially restrictive certificates would prevent.
Q: How does The Tashkent Files fit into the true-story spy genre?
Vivek Agnihotri’s The Tashkent Files (2019) occupies a unique position within the true-story spy genre because it depicts not a confirmed intelligence operation but a conspiracy theory: the allegation that former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in Tashkent in 1966 was not natural but the result of assassination, potentially involving Soviet, American, or domestic intelligence agencies. The film’s “inspired by true events” claim is complicated by the fact that the events it depicts are contested rather than confirmed: the official position is that Shastri died of a heart attack, and the conspiracy theories that the film presents as dramatically compelling have not been substantiated by any official investigation. The film’s contribution to the true-story spy genre is its demonstration that the genre can address unresolved historical mysteries as well as confirmed operations, and its commercial success (approximately Rs 18 crore) confirmed that the audience’s appetite for intelligence-adjacent conspiracy content exists alongside its appetite for confirmed-operation narratives. The film’s political dimensions, which align with specific political narratives about the Congress party’s historical governance, illustrate how the “inspired by true events” label can be deployed in service of political arguments that extend beyond the film’s ostensible subject.
Q: How do streaming series handle the “based on true events” claim differently from theatrical films?
Streaming series handle the “based on true events” claim differently from theatrical films because the extended runtime allows for greater operational detail, more complex character development, and more nuanced engagement with the ambiguities that the true-story label creates. The Family Man (Amazon Prime Video), while not explicitly “based on true events,” draws on real intelligence methodologies with enough specificity to generate audience discussions about its accuracy, and the series format’s eight-to-twelve-hour runtime allows for the kind of operational detail that the theatrical film’s two-to-three-hour runtime cannot accommodate. Special Ops (Disney+ Hotstar) explicitly claims a true-story basis, depicting a fictional RAW operative whose career spans multiple real intelligence events (the Parliament attack, the 26/11 attacks, the IC-814 hijacking) with a scope that no single theatrical film could match. The streaming format’s advantage for true-story intelligence content is that it can depict the tedium, the institutional politics, and the personal cost of intelligence work alongside the operational action, creating a more complete portrait of intelligence reality than the theatrical film’s compressed format permits.
Q: What is the most ethically problematic “based on true events” spy film?
The most ethically problematic entries in the true-story spy genre are those that depict events whose participants are alive and unable to respond, or that depict communities whose characterization has real-world political consequences. Romeo Akbar Walter’s depiction of a fictional RAW operative whose institutional abandonment mirrors real cases of operative betrayal raises ethical questions about whether the film exploits the suffering of real operatives who cannot publicly respond. Phantom’s depiction of fictional assassinations of real, named individuals (the film’s characters are thinly fictionalized versions of real people) raises questions about whether cinematic depiction of fictional violence against identifiable real people constitutes a form of incitement or defamation. The Dhurandhar franchise’s depiction of Lyari and the Baloch community raises questions about whether the creative use of a real community’s identity in a fictional context carries obligations of accuracy and sensitivity that the “inspired by true events” label does not formally require but that ethical filmmaking should honor.
Q: How do Bollywood true-story spy films compare to Hollywood’s true-story spy films?
Hollywood’s true-story spy genre (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Bridge of Spies, The Imitation Game) operates within a different institutional framework than Bollywood’s. The CIA’s Entertainment Liaison Office provides Hollywood with a formal channel for cooperation that shapes both the accuracy and the political orientation of the resulting films: films that cooperate with the CIA tend to depict the agency favorably, while films that do not cooperate (or that depict the agency critically) face the absence of institutional support. Bollywood’s informal cooperation model produces films whose accuracy is more variable (because the filmmakers’ access to institutional knowledge depends on personal relationships rather than formal channels) but whose political orientation is less constrained (because the absence of formal institutional oversight means that filmmakers can depict intelligence agencies critically without losing institutional support that they never had). The most significant difference is that Hollywood’s true-story spy films tend to depict confirmed operations whose broad outlines are publicly known (the Iranian hostage rescue in Argo, the Bin Laden raid in Zero Dark Thirty), while Bollywood’s tend to depict operations whose reality is officially unconfirmed (Dhurandhar’s deep-cover operations, Baby’s counter-terrorism missions), giving the Indian films a different relationship with truth and uncertainty than their American counterparts.
Q: What role do books and journalism play in the true-story spy film pipeline?
Books and journalism are the essential foundation of Bollywood’s true-story spy film pipeline. S. Hussain Zaidi’s investigative journalism (Black Friday, Dongri to Dubai, Mumbai Avengers) has provided source material for multiple films. Harinder Sikka’s Calling Sehmat provided the basis for Raazi. R.K. Yadav’s Mission R&AW has influenced multiple intelligence films. Hussain Zaidi’s Black Tornado, which documented the 26/11 attacks’ operational response, has informed the depiction of the attacks in multiple films. The journalist-investigator’s role is to bridge the gap between classified reality and public knowledge, producing narratives that are more detailed than official accounts but less complete than the classified record, and these narratives provide the raw material that filmmakers transform into cinematic entertainment. The quality of the resulting films is directly proportional to the quality of the journalistic source: Raazi’s emotional depth reflects Sikka’s sustained engagement with the real family, while less carefully researched films produce dramatizations whose accuracy and emotional authenticity are correspondingly weaker.
Q: How has the true-story spy genre evolved since Raazi?
The post-Raazi evolution of the true-story spy genre has been characterized by three trends. First, the psychological turn: following Raazi’s demonstration that the emotional cost of intelligence work could generate greater audience engagement than the operational triumph, subsequent true-story spy films have emphasized the psychological dimensions of intelligence service (Dhurandhar’s identity dissolution, Romeo Akbar Walter’s institutional betrayal) over the operational dimensions (mission planning, tactical execution). Second, the scale escalation: Dhurandhar’s commercial success at Rs 840+ crore and Dhurandhar 2’s at Rs 1,000+ crore have raised the production-value and narrative-ambition bar for true-story spy films, creating expectations that subsequent entries must match. Third, the streaming expansion: the streaming platforms’ investment in intelligence content (The Family Man, Special Ops) has created a parallel distribution channel for true-story intelligence narratives that accommodates the extended runtimes and complex storylines that the genre’s ambitions demand.
Q: What are the legal risks of making “based on true events” spy films in India?
The legal risks include defamation suits from individuals who claim to be identifiable in the film’s characters, challenges from the CBFC regarding the depiction of classified operations or sensitive political subjects, potential national-security objections from intelligence agencies that believe the film reveals classified operational methodologies, and copyright challenges from the authors of the books and articles that provide the film’s source material. Black Friday was banned from theatrical release for years due to legal challenges from individuals depicted in the film. Phantom faced a legal challenge from Hafiz Saeed’s organization, which objected to the film’s depiction of the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader. The legal landscape creates a chilling effect that is more influential than the formal legal outcomes: filmmakers self-censor sensitive content to avoid the time, expense, and uncertainty of legal challenges, and this self-censorship shapes the content of true-story spy films in ways that are difficult to measure but that undoubtedly constrain the genre’s engagement with the most sensitive operations and the most powerful subjects.
Q: How accurate is the depiction of RAW in Bollywood films compared to the real organization?
The cinematic RAW is a dramatic construction that bears a selective relationship to the real organization. The real RAW, established in 1968 by R.N. Kao following the intelligence failures of the 1962 war, is a civilian external intelligence agency whose operations are classified and whose institutional culture is characterized by extreme secrecy, institutional loyalty, and a bureaucratic structure that is more complex and more politically constrained than cinematic depictions suggest. Bollywood’s RAW tends to be more operationally autonomous (the cinematic RAW conducts operations with less political oversight than the real RAW faces), more technologically sophisticated (the cinematic RAW’s technical capabilities are often depicted at a level that exceeds the real organization’s reported capabilities), and more dramatically heroic (the cinematic RAW’s operatives are individual heroes, while the real RAW’s operations are institutional achievements whose success depends on coordination rather than individual brilliance). The most accurate dimension of the cinematic RAW is its depiction of the institutional culture of secrecy and deniability: the films’ consistent portrayal of RAW denying its operatives when they are compromised reflects the real institution’s documented behavior in several cases. The spy thriller ranking evaluates the cinematic quality of these depictions independently of their accuracy.
Q: What is the commercial premium of the “based on true events” label for spy films?
Analysis of the box office data suggests that the “based on true events” label generates a measurable commercial premium for spy films. Raazi (Rs 194 crore worldwide) outperformed its star power (Alia Bhatt was not yet a reliable Rs 100 crore star) and its production scale (the film’s budget was modest by spy-genre standards), suggesting that the true-story label generated audience engagement that exceeded what the film’s other commercial assets would have produced. Uri (Rs 342 crore worldwide) dramatically outperformed every prediction based on Vicky Kaushal’s pre-Uri star power, suggesting that the true-story surgical-strikes premise was the primary commercial driver. Dhurandhar’s “inspired by true events” framing contributed to its cultural-event status by creating the audience perception that the film revealed something about real intelligence operations that the public had not previously known. The commercial premium exists because the “true story” label satisfies two audience needs simultaneously: the need for entertainment (which fictional films also satisfy) and the need for information (which only the “true story” label provides), and the combination of both needs generates greater audience motivation to purchase tickets than either need alone.
Q: How do true-story spy films handle the depiction of torture and interrogation?
The depiction of torture and interrogation in true-story spy films raises specific ethical questions because the audience’s knowledge that the events are “based on true events” gives the depicted violence a moral weight that fictional violence does not carry. Baby depicts interrogation methods with procedural specificity that has been both praised (by viewers who appreciate the operational authenticity) and criticized (by human-rights advocates who argue that the depiction normalizes enhanced interrogation). Raazi depicts the psychological pressure of maintaining a cover identity as a form of sustained psychological torture whose damage is more devastating than physical violence because it is self-inflicted and continuous. Dhurandhar depicts the specific trauma of identity dissolution, in which the operative’s personality is progressively replaced by the cover identity, as a form of institutional violence that the intelligence establishment inflicts on its own operatives in service of national security. Each film’s treatment of these subjects reveals the filmmaker’s ethical position on the relationship between national security and individual rights, and the audience’s response to each treatment reveals the public’s tolerance for state violence conducted in their name. The most ethically sophisticated films (Raazi, Dhurandhar) present the violence as tragic rather than triumphant, arguing that the damage intelligence operations inflict on both their targets and their operatives is a cost that must be acknowledged rather than celebrated.
Q: What is the significance of the Tashkent Files and similar conspiracy-theory spy films?
Conspiracy-theory spy films occupy a distinct position within the true-story genre because they depict events whose reality is not merely classified but disputed. The Tashkent Files presents the conspiracy theory that Shastri was assassinated as a dramatically compelling possibility rather than as an established fact, and the film’s “inspired by true events” framing gives the conspiracy theory a credibility boost that it would not receive from a documentary or a journalistic investigation. The ethical challenge of conspiracy-theory spy films is that the “inspired by true events” label can function as a mechanism for mainstreaming unsubstantiated claims: when millions of viewers watch a film that presents a conspiracy theory within a dramatic framework that makes the theory feel emotionally convincing, the theory acquires a cultural legitimacy that its evidentiary basis does not support. The genre’s responsibility in handling conspiracy material is to maintain the distinction between dramatization (exploring what might have happened) and assertion (claiming that it did happen), and the films that maintain this distinction responsibly are the ones that contribute to public discourse rather than contaminating it.
Q: How has the true-story spy genre influenced Indian public discourse about intelligence oversight?
The true-story spy genre has contributed to a growing public discourse about intelligence oversight by depicting both the capabilities and the costs of intelligence operations with enough specificity to enable informed public conversation. Before the genre’s emergence, Indian public discourse about intelligence was characterized by near-total ignorance: the public knew almost nothing about how RAW and IB operated, what capabilities they possessed, or what constraints they faced, and the intelligence community’s institutional invisibility prevented any public accountability mechanism from developing. The genre has partially filled this information vacuum by providing the public with a framework, dramatized and imperfect but substantively richer than complete ignorance, for understanding intelligence operations. The patriotic cinema analysis examines how the intelligence-patriotism model has shifted public expectations about national security, and the true-story spy genre’s contribution to this shift is its provision of the operational vocabulary that the public needs to engage in informed discourse about intelligence policy, oversight, and accountability. The genre’s seven-decade evolution continues, and the untold stories await.
