Dhurandhar does not dramatize history. It reorganizes it. The franchise takes real events scattered across two decades of Indian geopolitical experience, events the nation processed as separate crises separated by years and by radically different political contexts and governmental responses, and rearranges them into a single espionage narrative whose central argument is that these events were never truly isolated from one another. The IC-814 hijacking, the Parliament attack, the brutal gang wars of Lyari, the Mumbai attacks of 2008: in the historical record, these exist as distinct chapters in India’s security story, each with its own causes, its own political response, and its own place in the national memory. In Aditya Dhar’s sprawling and ambitiously constructed franchise, they exist as nodes in a single interconnected network, connected by personnel, by ideology, by geography, and by the institutional failures that allowed each successive crisis to occur. The reorganization is the argument. By compressing two decades of separate and individually devastating traumas into the operational timeline of a single undercover mission, Dhurandhar forces the audience to see connections that the chronological experience of living through these events, one at a time, years apart, obscured.

This argument, that India’s security crises from the late nineties through the late two thousands were not a series of unfortunate and unrelated events but rather a cascading and increasingly devastating consequence of a single initial failure of political will, is the franchise’s most provocative and most historically consequential intellectual proposition. The initial failure, as the franchise carefully and deliberately frames it, was the Kandahar capitulation: the decision to release three imprisoned militants, including the man who would go on to found one of the subcontinent’s most lethal terrorist organizations, in exchange for the passengers of IC-814. Everything that follows in the franchise’s densely plotted narrative, every death, every betrayal, every agonizing moral compromise that the characters endure across both installments, is presented as a downstream consequence of that single decision, a ripple effect that took years and multiple governmental administrations to reach its full destructive expression. Whether this reading of history is accurate or reductive is a question the franchise invites but deliberately does not answer, and the tension between its narrative coherence and the messy complexity of historical reality is the central subject of this analysis. For a complete walkthrough of how these events function within the narrative, see our analyses of Dhurandhar Part 1 and The Revenge.

The real events that inform the franchise fall into four categories based on their structural function within the narrative, and organizing them by this function rather than by chronology reveals the specific ways in which Dhar uses history as raw material for fiction. There are origin events, the crises that create the conditions for the franchise’s existence and that provide the protagonist’s motivation. There are setting events, the real-world dynamics that create the operational environment in which the fictional mission unfolds. There are climactic events, the historical traumas that the franchise builds toward and that provide its emotional and dramatic peak. And there are contextual events, the political and economic developments that the franchise weaves into its narrative texture without making them central to the plot. Each category involves a different relationship between history and fiction, a different set of ethical questions about the use of real trauma in commercial entertainment, and a different set of analytical challenges for the critic attempting to evaluate the franchise’s engagement with the historical record. The four-category framework also reveals the franchise’s argumentative architecture, which builds from origin through setting and climax to context, creating a layered engagement with history that operates on multiple registers simultaneously and that produces the sense of historical depth and specificity that distinguishes the franchise from the more casual historical references that characterize most Bollywood spy thrillers.

Origin Events: The Wounds That Create the Mission

The IC-814 hijacking functions in the Dhurandhar franchise not as a historical event to be depicted but as a wound to be felt. The franchise’s treatment of the Kandahar crisis is simultaneously its most historically grounded sequence and its most narratively instrumental, using the real events of late December 1999 as the emotional foundation upon which the entire seven-hour narrative is constructed.

The historical facts are these: five armed militants linked to the Pakistan-based Islamist group Harakat-ul-Mujahideen hijacked an Indian Airlines flight carrying approximately 190 people on a route from Kathmandu to Delhi, diverting it through multiple locations including Amritsar, Lahore, and Dubai before finally landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, then under Taliban control. After a week-long standoff that gripped the nation and dominated television coverage through the final days of the millennium, the Indian government released three imprisoned militants, including Masood Azhar, who subsequently founded Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the organizations most frequently linked to subsequent terrorist attacks against India. A passenger named Rupin Katyal was stabbed to death by the hijackers during the crisis. The crisis was experienced by the Indian public as a national humiliation, a moment when the government was forced to capitulate to terrorist demands on international television, with the then-External Affairs Minister personally escorting the released prisoners to their freedom on the Kandahar tarmac. The released militants went on to be connected, directly or through the organizations they led, to attacks including the 2001 assault on the Indian Parliament, the 2016 Pathankot attack, and the 2019 Pulwama attack.

Dhar’s franchise uses these facts with selective precision. The Kandahar sequence in Part 1 does not attempt a comprehensive dramatization of the hijacking; it focuses on a specific moment within the crisis, the point at which the decision to capitulate is made, and it frames that moment through the eyes of a fictional intelligence officer, Ajay Sanyal, who is depicted pleading for more time, arguing that his operatives can break the standoff without concessions. The refusal of his plea, the political decision to prioritize the immediate safety of the hostages over the long-term security implications of releasing dangerous militants, becomes the franchise’s inciting incident: the moment that convinces Sanyal that the conventional institutional response to terrorism is inadequate and that a different kind of operation, longer, deeper, more morally compromised, is necessary.

The historical character who most clearly inspires Sanyal’s depiction in this sequence is the intelligence figure whose career trajectory mirrors the fictional character’s arc from frustrated institutional operative to architect of unconventional operations. The franchise does not name this figure, maintaining a distance between fiction and reality that is legally prudent and artistically useful, but the parallels in biography, operational philosophy, and institutional position are legible to any viewer familiar with India’s intelligence history. The franchise’s treatment of this inspiration is careful: it borrows the professional trajectory and the operational philosophy while inventing the personal characteristics, the emotional life, and the specific moral compromises that make Sanyal a dramatic character rather than a biographical portrait. R. Madhavan’s performance, analyzed in detail in our Ajay Sanyal character study, brings a moral weight to the character that transcends the biographical parallel, creating a figure who is both historically resonant and fictionally autonomous.

The Parliament attack of 2001 functions as the second origin event, the crisis that escalates Sanyal’s conviction from frustration to action. The franchise’s treatment of the Parliament attack is more compressed than its treatment of Kandahar, using the event primarily as a narrative accelerant: the definitive proof that the Kandahar capitulation’s consequences were already manifesting in violent form, that the released militants were already turning their freedom into operational capability directed against the Indian state itself, and that the window for conventional diplomatic and institutional response was closing rapidly with each successive attack. The franchise draws a direct and unambiguous line from the released prisoners to the Parliament attackers, a connection that has historical basis in the documented links between Jaish-e-Mohammed, the organization Masood Azhar founded after his release, and the attack’s planning and execution, though the franchise compresses and simplifies these connections considerably for dramatic clarity and narrative efficiency.

The compression is significant because it reveals one of the franchise’s central narrative strategies: the transformation of complex, multi-causal historical events into clear causal chains that serve the dramatic architecture. The real relationship between the Kandahar release and the Parliament attack involves multiple organizations, competing agendas, state and non-state actors, and years of institutional dynamics that resist the clean causality the franchise imposes. By simplifying this relationship into a direct consequence, Dhurandhar creates a narrative logic that is dramatically compelling but historically reductive: the audience experiences a clear chain of cause and effect, Kandahar leads to Parliament leads to the mission, that the historical record does not support with the same clarity. This simplification is not a flaw in the filmmaking; it is a choice, a deliberate prioritization of narrative coherence over historical complexity that the audience should recognize as a feature of the genre rather than as a statement about history.

The franchise’s treatment of the Parliament attack also reveals its approach to depicting institutional response. Where the Kandahar sequence focuses on the moment of capitulation, the Parliament attack sequence focuses on the aftermath, the institutional reckoning that follows a security failure so dramatic that it forces a reconsideration of fundamental assumptions about how the state protects itself. Sanyal’s response to the Parliament attack is not grief or anger but calculation: if the released militants have already turned their freedom into the capability to attack the seat of Indian democracy, then the conventional approach to terrorism, reactive, defensive, constrained by diplomatic considerations, has been proven inadequate. The mission that Sanyal conceives is born not from a single moment of inspiration but from the accumulated evidence of two successive failures, the Kandahar release and the Parliament attack, that together demonstrate a pattern of institutional inadequacy that only an unconventional response can address.

The franchise’s depiction of this institutional reckoning is one of its most historically grounded elements, because the real debates within India’s security establishment following these events are documented in the public record and reflect genuine disagreements about the appropriate balance between diplomatic restraint and operational aggression. The franchise takes a clear position within this debate, arguing through its narrative structure that operational aggression was the correct response, but it acknowledges the existence of the opposing position through the institutional resistance that Sanyal encounters, the bureaucratic caution, the political calculation, and the risk aversion that the franchise depicts as obstacles to the mission rather than as legitimate strategic considerations.

The origin events collectively establish the franchise’s emotional foundation: the sense that India has been wounded, that the wounds are connected, and that the conventional institutional responses have failed to prevent successive injuries. This emotional foundation is what makes the mission, the decade-long infiltration of Karachi’s criminal underworld by a single operative, feel narratively justified despite its operational implausibility. The audience accepts the extraordinary premise because the origin events have established a context of extraordinary failure that demands an extraordinary response. The historical grounding of the origin events gives this narrative justification a weight that a purely fictional premise could not achieve, which is both the franchise’s primary artistic advantage and its primary ethical challenge: it uses real national trauma to validate fictional wish-fulfillment, borrowing the emotional authority of actual suffering to authorize a narrative of imagined redemption.

Setting Events: The World the Mission Inhabits

The franchise’s engagement with Operation Lyari and the figure of Chaudhry Aslam Khan represents a fundamentally different relationship between history and fiction than the origin events, because here the franchise is not using historical events as narrative triggers but as the raw material for world-building, drawing on real-world dynamics to create the operational environment in which the fictional mission unfolds.

The historical Lyari is a densely populated neighborhood in Karachi that became, during the two thousands, a battleground between criminal syndicates, political factions, and law enforcement agencies whose competing claims to authority produced a level of violence that transformed the area into what journalists and residents described as a war zone. The criminal networks that controlled Lyari operated through extortion, drug trafficking, and arms dealing, maintaining their power through a combination of violence, political patronage, and the provision of social services that the state had failed to deliver. The law enforcement response, led in significant part by the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, involved aggressive operations that were simultaneously praised for their effectiveness in dismantling criminal networks and condemned for their reliance on extrajudicial methods, including alleged fake encounters.

The franchise draws on this historical reality to create its fictional Lyari with a specificity that goes beyond casual inspiration. The criminal ecosystem depicted in the film, with its hierarchies, its territorial boundaries, its relationship between criminal authority and civilian life, mirrors the documented dynamics of the real Lyari with sufficient accuracy to suggest extensive research by the filmmaking team. The character of Rehman Dakait, played by Akshaye Khanna, shares his name with the real gangster Abdul Rehman Baloch, known as Rehman Dakait, who controlled significant criminal operations in Lyari until his death in 2009 in what was alleged to be a police encounter staged by Chaudhry Aslam Khan. The real Rehman Dakait’s wife publicly alleged that the encounter was fabricated, a claim that the Sindh High Court took seriously enough to order an FIR against Aslam.

The real Rehman Dakait was a figure of considerable complexity within Lyari’s social ecology: a criminal who operated through violence and extortion but who also functioned, in the absence of effective state governance, as a provider of certain forms of order and protection that the state had failed to deliver. His assassination in 2009, whether a legitimate encounter or a staged execution, removed one power center from Lyari’s landscape and precipitated a reconfiguration of criminal authority that contributed to the instability that the subsequent grand operation of 2012 attempted to address. The franchise’s fictional Rehman shares this structural position within the Lyari ecosystem, functioning simultaneously as a criminal threat and as a governing authority whose removal would create its own form of chaos. Akshaye Khanna’s portrayal, which finds the intelligence and the strategic acumen beneath the criminal surface, reflects an understanding of the real Rehman’s position within Lyari’s power dynamics that goes beyond the one-dimensional villainy that a less researched depiction might have produced.

The franchise also borrows from the real dynamics of Lyari’s gang wars, which during the two thousands involved not merely criminal competition but complex interactions between criminal syndicates, political parties, intelligence agencies, and militant organizations that used Lyari’s ungoverned spaces as operational territory. The People’s Aman Committee, a political organization with deep roots in Lyari’s community structures, the Pakistan People’s Party, which maintained patronage relationships with certain criminal figures, and the various intelligence agencies that operated within Karachi’s complex security landscape all feature, in fictionalized forms, within the franchise’s depiction of the power dynamics that shape the world in which Hamza operates. The layering of these multiple power structures creates the sense of a world in which no single authority is supreme and every alliance is contingent, a quality that the historical record of Lyari during this period abundantly supports.

The character of S.P. Choudhary Aslam, played by Sanjay Dutt, maps onto the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan with a directness that makes the inspiration unmistakable. The real officer was a figure of extraordinary contradictions: celebrated as a hero who fought criminals and militants with fearless determination, he was simultaneously accused of extrajudicial killings, staged encounters, and methods that blurred the boundary between law enforcement and vigilantism. He survived at least nine assassination attempts, including a massive truck bomb at his residence in the Defence Phase VIII area of Karachi that killed eight people but left him and his family alive, before finally being killed by a car bomb on the Lyari Expressway when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into his convoy. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility, citing his role in operations against their members. The blast was so powerful that it hurled the wreckage of his bulletproof vehicle approximately twenty meters from the impact site.

The real Chaudhry Aslam’s career arc provides the franchise with a character template that is inherently dramatic: a law enforcement officer who operates in the grey zone between legitimate policing and extrajudicial violence, who is simultaneously celebrated and condemned, who survives repeated attempts on his life with an apparent invulnerability that borders on the mythic, and who ultimately falls to the violence that defined his professional life. His career as the head of the Lyari Task Force, his role in the killing of the real Rehman Dakait, his arrest and imprisonment for the Mashooq Brohi encounter case, his return to service and his subsequent leadership of the grand Lyari operation of 2012, and his final assassination in 2014 provide a biographical narrative that is as dramatically structured as any fiction. The franchise borrows the dramatic structure of this real career while filling it with fictional content that serves the espionage narrative rather than the biographical record.

The real officer’s methods, particularly his reputation as an “encounter specialist,” a term that in South Asian policing is a euphemism for extrajudicial killing, raise questions that the franchise engages with selectively. The franchise acknowledges Aslam’s moral ambiguity through Sanjay Dutt’s performance, which communicates institutional fatigue and pragmatic ruthlessness alongside physical authority, but it does not fully explore the human rights implications of the real officer’s methods. The real Chaudhry Aslam was suspended from service, arrested, and jailed for staging an encounter; the franchise’s Aslam operates with an institutional freedom that the real officer’s career complications did not consistently permit. This selective engagement with the real officer’s moral complexity, which preserves the dramatic utility of his contradictions while avoiding the full ethical weight of his methods, is characteristic of the franchise’s broader approach to historical material: it borrows enough reality to create authenticity while managing the reality it borrows to serve the narrative’s dramatic requirements.

Sanjay Dutt’s portrayal preserves the physical authority, the operational fearlessness, and the institutional complexity of the real officer while mythologizing certain dimensions of the character for dramatic purposes. The film’s Aslam is more singular in his authority, more isolated in his power, and more philosophically articulate about his methods than the historical record suggests the real officer was. The mythologization is a function of the genre: the spy thriller requires its supporting characters to be legible as dramatic types while retaining enough specificity to feel grounded, and Dutt’s Aslam achieves this balance by borrowing the real officer’s operational profile while inventing the inner life that the historical record cannot provide.

The ethical dimension of this portrayal deserves serious analysis. The real Chaudhry Aslam Khan was assassinated. His family lives with the consequences of his career and his death. The transformation of a real person who died violently into a fictional character in a commercial entertainment raises questions that the franchise does not address and that the audience should consider: questions about consent, about the right of the dead to be represented accurately, and about the ethics of borrowing the authority of a real person’s suffering to enhance the dramatic impact of a fictional narrative. The franchise is not unique in facing these questions; every work of historical fiction confronts them in some form. But the specificity of the parallels between the fictional Aslam and the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, combined with the franchise’s commercial scale, makes these questions more pressing than they would be for a less prominent production.

The setting events also include the broader dynamics of Karachi’s criminal and political landscape during the two thousands, dynamics that the franchise uses to create the social ecology within which Hamza operates. The intersection of criminal syndicates, intelligence agencies, militant organizations, and political parties that characterized Karachi during this period is historically documented and provides the franchise with a setting of genuine complexity that enriches the fictional narrative. The franchise’s depiction of these intersections, while simplified for dramatic purposes, captures the essential quality of a city in which the boundaries between criminal, institutional, and political power were permeable, where alliances shifted based on operational convenience rather than ideological alignment, and where the distinction between law enforcement and lawlessness was often a matter of perspective rather than principle.

The world-building dimension of the franchise’s historical engagement is its most artistically successful aspect, because it allows the filmmakers to use real-world complexity to create a fictional environment that feels lived-in rather than constructed. As analyzed in our examination of Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking style, the director’s approach to world-building treats the setting as a narrative agent rather than a backdrop, and the historical research that informs the franchise’s Lyari gives this narrative agency a specificity and a credibility that purely invented settings rarely achieve. You can explore the franchise’s complete box office journey interactively to see how this historically grounded world-building translated into sustained audience engagement.

Climactic Events: The Traumas the Franchise Builds Toward

The Mumbai attacks of November 2008 function as the franchise’s emotional and dramatic climax, the event toward which the entire narrative arc bends and from which the sequel’s revenge narrative draws its moral justification. The franchise’s treatment of 26/11, as the attacks are commonly designated in Indian public discourse, is its most emotionally charged engagement with historical reality and its most ethically fraught, because it uses the single most traumatic terrorist event in modern Indian history as the pivot point of a commercial entertainment narrative.

The historical facts of the Mumbai attacks are seared into the collective memory of the Indian public. Over approximately sixty hours, ten gunmen launched coordinated attacks across Mumbai, targeting the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, the Leopold Cafe, the Chabad House, and other locations, killing 166 people and wounding more than 300. The attacks were planned and directed from Pakistan, with the gunmen receiving real-time instructions via satellite phone from handlers in Karachi. The only surviving attacker, Ajmal Kasab, was captured, tried, and executed. The attacks transformed India’s relationship with Pakistan, ended a peace process that had been developing between the two countries, and became a defining event in India’s post-independence national narrative, comparable in emotional impact to the September 2001 attacks in the United States.

The franchise’s depiction of 26/11 uses the historical footage and the public memory of the attacks with a directorial awareness that reflects the gravity of the material. Dhar does not attempt a comprehensive dramatization of the attacks; instead, he uses specific elements, the satellite phone conversations between the attackers and their handlers, the television footage that the nation watched in real time, the specific locations and images that have become iconic in Indian collective memory, to evoke the emotional impact of the event without attempting to reproduce its full scope. The approach is selective rather than exhaustive, and the selectivity serves both dramatic and ethical purposes: it provides enough historical specificity to ground the emotional response while avoiding the exploitative potential of a comprehensive recreation that could reduce real suffering to entertainment spectacle.

The specific choices Dhar makes in depicting the attacks reveal a sophisticated understanding of how collective memory operates and how it can be activated through selective reference rather than comprehensive reproduction. Rather than restaging the attacks with actors and special effects, which would inevitably feel like a diminishment of the real events, the franchise uses documentary-style elements, the red-screen text displays, the intercepted communications, the news footage, that reference the real events without attempting to replace them. This approach acknowledges that the audience’s own memories of watching the attacks unfold on television are more powerful than any dramatization could be, and it uses those memories as the primary emotional resource, triggering them through selective reference rather than attempting to override them with fictional recreation.

The decision to use what the film presents as reconstructions of the satellite phone communications between the attackers and their handlers represents the franchise’s most direct engagement with documented historical evidence and its most emotionally devastating sequence. The communications, which reveal the real-time direction of the attacks from a control room in Karachi, are historically documented and have been partially released through court proceedings and intelligence reports. The franchise’s use of this material, presented in a format that references actual intelligence intercepts, creates a moment in the film that operates on the boundary between fiction and documentation, borrowing the authority of real evidence to enhance the dramatic impact of a fictional narrative. The red-screen format strips away the cinematic apparatus that characterizes the rest of the franchise, replacing the composed cinematography and the carefully designed production aesthetic with a starkness that communicates the raw horror of the communications. The effect is deliberate: the stylistic shift from the franchise’s usual visual sophistication to the brutal simplicity of the red-screen displays signals to the audience that they have moved from the realm of fiction into something closer to historical testimony.

The franchise positions 26/11 as the consequence of the institutional failures that the origin events established: the Kandahar capitulation released the militants who created the organizations that planned the attacks, and the failure to respond effectively to the Parliament attack allowed those organizations to develop the operational capability that produced 26/11. This causal chain, while dramatically compelling, involves significant historical compression: the real relationship between the Kandahar release, the Parliament attack, and the Mumbai attacks involves multiple organizations, competing state interests, years of intelligence failures and successes, and dynamics that resist the clean linearity the franchise imposes. The franchise’s simplification of these dynamics into a single causal narrative is its most significant departure from historical accuracy and its most effective dramatic strategy, because it transforms the helpless rage that Indians felt watching the Mumbai attacks unfold on television into a narrative demand for the kind of decisive action that the franchise’s fictional operation represents.

The emotional architecture of the franchise’s 26/11 treatment deserves analysis because it reveals the specific relationship between historical trauma and commercial entertainment that the franchise depends upon. The real 26/11 was an event of helplessness: the Indian public watched on television as their city was attacked and their compatriots were killed, unable to intervene, unable to prevent, forced to wait for a conclusion that took three days to arrive. The franchise transforms this helplessness into agency by providing a fictional narrative in which the attacks are not merely suffered but avenged, in which the institutional failures that allowed the attacks to occur are not merely mourned but corrected through the operational success of the undercover mission. This transformation of helplessness into agency is the franchise’s primary emotional transaction with its audience, and the power of that transaction is proportional to the authenticity of the helplessness that the historical material provides.

The transformation operates through a specific narrative mechanism that is worth analyzing because it reveals how the franchise manages the boundary between historical testimony and fictional consolation. The 26/11 sequence in the franchise arrives at a point in the narrative when the audience is deeply invested in the protagonist’s mission, when they understand the personal costs he has paid and the operational objectives he has pursued. The arrival of the attacks disrupts this investment by confronting the protagonist, and the audience, with the reality that the mission has not prevented the catastrophe it was designed to prevent. The attacks represent the mission’s failure at the exact moment when the audience most wants it to succeed, and this narrative placement is essential to the emotional architecture: the franchise does not use 26/11 to validate the mission but to complicate it, to force the audience to confront the possibility that the sacrifices the protagonist has made may not be sufficient to prevent the horrors that the historical record confirms.

The sequel’s treatment of the post-26/11 period then transforms this complication into resolution, using the attacks as the catalyst for the operational escalation that drives the second installment’s narrative. The franchise’s argument is that 26/11 was both a failure of the existing approach and the trigger for a new approach, one that was more aggressive, more willing to accept operational risks, and more committed to decisive action than the approach that preceded it. The emotional trajectory from the despair of the 26/11 sequence to the resolution of the sequel’s climax mirrors the emotional trajectory that the franchise offers its audience: from the helplessness of watching real events unfold to the agency of participating, vicariously, in a fictional response that provides the decisive action the real-world political response did not deliver.

The use of real 26/11 elements, including what the film presents as reconstructions of the satellite phone communications between the attackers and their handlers, represents the franchise’s most direct engagement with documented historical evidence. The red-screen presentation of these communications, which presents the calls in a format that references actual intelligence intercepts that have been widely reported and partially released, creates a moment in the film that operates on the boundary between fiction and documentation, borrowing the authority of real evidence to enhance the dramatic impact of a fictional narrative. The effect is powerful and ethically complex: the audience experiences the communications as both historical document and dramatic device, and the ambiguity between these two registers gives the sequence an emotional intensity that neither register could achieve alone.

The franchise’s treatment of the political response to 26/11, which frames the then-government’s emphasis on diplomatic engagement over military retaliation as a failure of will rather than a considered strategic choice, reflects a specific political interpretation that has been widely debated in Indian public discourse. The film does not present this interpretation as one perspective among several; it presents it as the obvious conclusion that any reasonable observer would draw, and this presentation is one of the primary sources of the controversy that has surrounded the franchise since its release. The question of whether diplomatic engagement was the correct response to 26/11 is genuinely contested among security analysts, foreign policy scholars, and political commentators, and the franchise’s treatment of this question as settled rather than open is its most significant moment of political advocacy. For a thorough examination of the controversies this treatment generated, see our analysis of the franchise’s controversies explained.

Contextual Events: The Political and Economic Texture

The franchise weaves several additional historical developments into its narrative texture without making them central to the plot, using them to create a sense of historical specificity and to anchor the fictional timeline in recognizable political reality.

The demonetisation of high-denomination currency notes, one of the most dramatic economic policy decisions in recent Indian history, appears in the franchise as a narrative element that connects financial policy to national security operations. The franchise’s argument is that demonetisation served not only the officially stated purposes of combating corruption and counterfeit currency but also functioned as a tool in the broader security architecture, disrupting the financial networks that sustained cross-border terrorism by invalidating the physical currency that these networks depended upon. This interpretation of demonetisation as a security measure rather than purely an economic policy represents a specific political reading that has been advanced by some security analysts but contested by many economists, and the franchise’s incorporation of this reading into its narrative reflects its broader pattern of adopting interpretations that support the premise of coordinated, decisive governmental action against terrorism.

The treatment of demonetisation within the franchise’s narrative structure illustrates the difference between contextual events and the origin, setting, and climactic events discussed above. The franchise does not build its dramatic architecture around demonetisation; it uses the policy as a narrative element that enhances the sense of a coordinated national security strategy operating across multiple domains simultaneously. The effect is to create an impression of governmental competence and strategic sophistication that the franchise’s depiction of the earlier political responses to terrorism deliberately undermines, establishing a contrast between the indecision of earlier governments and the decisiveness of later ones that carries obvious political implications.

The franchise’s incorporation of demonetisation also reveals something about how contextual events function differently from the other categories of historical material the franchise employs. The origin events and climactic events carry their own emotional weight that the franchise activates and channels; the audience has pre-existing emotional associations with the IC-814 hijacking and the Mumbai attacks that the franchise leverages for dramatic purposes. Demonetisation, by contrast, carries a different kind of pre-existing association: it was experienced by the Indian public primarily as an economic disruption, a policy that affected daily life through the temporary unavailability of cash and the logistical challenges of currency exchange. The franchise’s reframing of this economic disruption as a national security measure recodes the audience’s memory of the event, inviting them to reconsider an experience they processed as economic inconvenience as, instead, a dimension of the security project the franchise celebrates. This recoding function is one of the franchise’s most subtle uses of historical material, because it does not merely borrow the emotional weight of past events but actively reshapes the audience’s understanding of those events by placing them in a new narrative context.

The political transitions depicted in the franchise, which correspond to real changes in Indian government, function similarly as contextual texture rather than as central narrative elements. The franchise implies that the fictional operation received authorization and support that previous governments had been unwilling to provide, and this implication creates a political narrative within the espionage narrative: the suggestion that the change in government enabled a change in approach to national security that made operations like the fictional Dhurandhar possible. The franchise does not make this argument explicitly; it is embedded in the narrative structure, in the contrast between the governmental responses to the origin events and the governmental support for the operation, and its presence is legible to viewers who are aware of the political timeline without being stated in terms that would transform the film from entertainment into political advocacy.

The handling of political transition is one of the franchise’s most delicate narrative maneuvers, because it engages with the most contested dimension of contemporary Indian politics without appearing to do so directly. The franchise never names political parties, never identifies specific prime ministers by name, and never makes explicit partisan statements. Yet the temporal alignment of the fictional operation’s authorization with real political transitions, combined with the franchise’s consistent framing of pre-transition responses as inadequate and post-transition responses as decisive, creates an implicit political argument that is legible to any viewer familiar with the political chronology. This implicit political argument is more effective than an explicit one would be, because it operates through narrative implication rather than through statement, reaching the audience’s political understanding through the emotional pathways of the espionage narrative rather than through the analytical pathways of political discourse. The franchise’s ability to make a political argument without appearing to make one is perhaps its most commercially astute creative achievement, because it allows viewers across the political spectrum to engage with the narrative without feeling that they are consuming political propaganda, even as the narrative’s structural implications favor a specific political interpretation.

The contextual events also include the real-world dynamics of Indian intelligence operations, which the franchise references through the institutional structures and operational methods it depicts. The franchise’s depiction of RAW and IB operations, while fictionalized, borrows enough from the documented culture and methodology of these organizations to create a sense of institutional specificity that grounds the fictional narrative in organizational reality. The franchise’s Sanyal operates within institutional constraints that are recognizable to anyone familiar with Indian intelligence bureaucracy: the inter-agency rivalries, the political oversight, the tension between operational ambition and institutional caution that characterizes intelligence work in democratic states. The character of Major Iqbal, whose institutional position on the Pakistani side mirrors Sanyal’s on the Indian side, provides a structural parallel that reflects the real-world symmetry between the intelligence establishments of the two countries, a symmetry that is documented in the historical literature on South Asian intelligence and that the franchise uses to create dramatic balance.

The institutional details extend to the specific tradecraft the franchise depicts: the communication methods, the surveillance techniques, the identity construction protocols, and the operational security measures that the characters employ. While these details are necessarily fictionalized for dramatic purposes and for security reasons, they borrow enough from the publicly documented tradecraft of intelligence agencies to create a sense of procedural authenticity that distinguishes the franchise from the more fantastical depictions of intelligence work that characterize the Bollywood spy films analyzed in our comparison article. The franchise’s commitment to procedural plausibility, even within the dramatic exaggerations that the genre requires, is one of the ways in which it uses real-world institutional dynamics as contextual material that enhances the credibility of the fictional narrative.

The Kulbhushan Jadhav case, though not explicitly referenced in the franchise, provides a real-world parallel that contextualizes the franchise’s fictional operation within the documented history of India-Pakistan intelligence rivalry. The Pakistani arrest of an Indian national in Balochistan on allegations of espionage, and the subsequent International Court of Justice proceedings that challenged the legality of his detention and trial, demonstrate that the kind of cross-border intelligence operations the franchise depicts are not purely fictional but exist within a documented reality of intelligence activity between the two countries. The franchise’s fictional operation, while dramatically heightened, operates within a real-world context in which intelligence agencies on both sides of the border have conducted operations on each other’s territory, and the Jadhav case provides contemporary evidence that this context is not merely historical but ongoing.

The contextual events collectively create a narrative texture that gives the franchise a specificity and a groundedness that purely fictional espionage narratives lack. The audience recognizes the political transitions, the economic policies, and the institutional dynamics as elements of their own lived experience, and this recognition creates a form of engagement that transcends the genre conventions of the spy thriller. The franchise’s world feels real not because it reproduces reality with documentary accuracy but because it incorporates enough recognizable elements of reality to trigger the audience’s own memories and associations, creating a viewing experience that is enriched by the viewer’s pre-existing knowledge of the historical period.

How the Franchise Reorganizes the Timeline

The most significant artistic choice in the franchise’s engagement with history is not which events it includes but how it arranges them relative to each other and to the fictional narrative. The real events that inform the franchise occurred across approximately two decades, in different political contexts, under different governments, and in response to different immediate causes. The franchise compresses this temporal span into the operational timeline of a single mission, creating a narrative in which events that were separated by years of historical time are connected by the continuous experience of a single protagonist.

The temporal compression is not unique to Dhurandhar; historical fiction has always compressed timelines to serve narrative purposes. What distinguishes the franchise’s compression is its argumentative function: the compression is not merely a practical convenience that allows a two-decade story to be told in seven hours of screen time, but a rhetorical strategy that argues for a specific reading of the historical period by eliminating the temporal gaps that separated the real events. The compression says: these events belong together. They are chapters in a single story, not independent incidents. The years between them were not periods of normalcy but periods of incubation, during which the consequences of one crisis were developing into the conditions for the next. This is an argument about history, embedded in narrative structure, and its persuasive power derives from the audience’s experience of the compressed timeline as continuous dramatic action rather than from any explicit historical claim.

This temporal compression produces a specific effect that is central to the franchise’s argument: it eliminates the intervals of normalcy that separated the real events, the years of ordinary life, political activity, economic development, and cultural change that occurred between the Kandahar crisis and the Parliament attack, between the Parliament attack and the Mumbai attacks, between each crisis and the next. By eliminating these intervals, the franchise creates the impression of a continuous assault that required a continuous response, transforming a series of intermittent crises into a sustained campaign that justified a sustained operation. The impression is artistically powerful but historically misleading: the real intervals between crises were periods of complex political, diplomatic, and security activity that cannot be reduced to mere waiting without distorting the historical record.

The comparison with other works of historical fiction that employ similar compression techniques is instructive. Oliver Stone’s JFK compressed years of investigation and speculation into a single courtroom drama, using temporal compression to argue for a specific reading of the Kennedy assassination that the disconnected evidence, experienced chronologically, did not compel. David Fincher’s Zodiac compressed decades of investigation into a narrative that used temporal acceleration to communicate the psychological weight of obsessive pursuit. In each case, the temporal compression is not neutral but argumentative: it shapes the audience’s understanding of the historical material by controlling the pace at which they experience it. Dhurandhar employs the same technique for the same purpose, using temporal compression to argue that India’s security crises were connected in ways that the chronological experience of living through them did not reveal.

The temporal compression also affects the franchise’s characterization, particularly the characterization of its protagonist. Jaskirat Singh Rangi, who becomes Hamza Ali Mazari, is depicted as a young man who enters the mission in the aftermath of the Kandahar crisis and who emerges from it in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, his entire adult life consumed by the operation. The historical span of this fictional career compresses real events into a personal timeline that gives the character’s sacrifice a weight and a specificity that a purely fictional timeline could not achieve: the audience knows that the events Jaskirat experienced as his mission were events that they, the audience, experienced as their national history, and this shared historical reference creates a form of empathy that connects the fictional character’s suffering to the audience’s own memory of the crises that define the period.

The personal cost of the temporal compression is one of the franchise’s most emotionally effective narrative strategies. By making a single character the experiential center of two decades of national security history, the franchise transforms abstract policy failures and geopolitical dynamics into intimate human suffering. The audience does not merely understand that the Kandahar capitulation had consequences; they see those consequences written on the face of a man who has spent his youth living with them. The audience does not merely know that 26/11 was devastating; they feel that devastation through the eyes of a character who has been working for years to prevent exactly this kind of attack and who must confront the reality that his sacrifices were insufficient. The personal dimension of the temporal compression is what gives the franchise its emotional power, and the historical grounding of the compressed timeline is what gives that emotional power its specific quality of resonance with the audience’s own experience.

The reorganization of the timeline also reveals the franchise’s argumentative strategy, which operates by making connections between events that the historical experience presented as separate. The audience experienced the Kandahar crisis, the Parliament attack, the Lyari gang wars, and the Mumbai attacks as distinct events, each with its own immediate cause and its own political context. The franchise argues that these events were connected, that the same networks, the same institutional failures, and the same geopolitical dynamics produced all of them, and that the failure to recognize these connections was itself a form of institutional failure that the fictional operation is designed to correct. This argument is not stated explicitly; it is embedded in the narrative structure, in the way the franchise arranges historical events into a causal chain that implies connection where the historical record shows complexity. The structural argument is the franchise’s most sophisticated engagement with history, because it operates on the audience through narrative form rather than through explicit statement, shaping their understanding of the historical period through the arrangement of events rather than through commentary on them.

The franchise’s use of the non-linear narrative structure, analyzed in detail in our examination of Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking style, adds an additional layer of temporal complexity to the reorganization. Within the already compressed timeline, the franchise presents events out of chronological order, withholding certain revelations, particularly the protagonist’s origin story, until the sequel. This double temporal manipulation, compression of the historical timeline and non-linear presentation of the compressed narrative, creates a viewing experience in which the audience must actively construct the chronological sequence from fragments presented in dramatic order. The active construction required by the non-linear presentation makes the audience a participant in the franchise’s argumentative strategy, because the connections they build between temporally dispersed narrative elements mirror the connections the franchise argues exist between historically dispersed real events. The audience’s cognitive experience of assembling the franchise’s narrative parallels the franchise’s own project of assembling India’s security history into a coherent story.

For the complete thematic analysis of how these historical reorganizations serve the franchise’s broader philosophical project, see our dedicated article on the duology’s themes and symbolism.

The Ethics of Fictionalization

The franchise’s engagement with real events raises ethical questions that deserve analysis independent of the artistic evaluation, because the ethical dimension of historical fiction is not reducible to the question of whether the fiction is good but extends to the question of whether the use of real suffering as raw material for commercial entertainment is justified, and whether the specific ways in which the franchise transforms real events into fictional narrative serve or disserve the memory of the people who experienced those events.

These questions are not academic abstractions; they have concrete human dimensions. The families of the 166 people killed in the Mumbai attacks continue to live with the consequences of that event. The family of the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan continues to navigate the complicated legacy of a figure who was simultaneously celebrated and condemned. The residents of Lyari continue to live in a neighborhood whose international reputation has been shaped, for many viewers, by a fictional depiction that they regard as fantasy. The franchise’s engagement with these real people and real communities creates obligations that the artistic evaluation alone cannot discharge, obligations of accuracy, of respect, and of proportionality in the use of real suffering for commercial purposes.

The most significant ethical question concerns the use of 26/11, which killed 166 real people whose families continue to live with the consequences of the attack. The franchise uses the emotional impact of this event, the horror, the grief, the anger, and the sense of national violation that the attacks produced, as the emotional fuel for a fictional revenge narrative that transforms helplessness into agency. This transformation is the franchise’s primary emotional offering to its audience: the promise that the suffering was not meaningless, that the institutional failures that allowed the attacks were corrected, and that the perpetrators were made to pay a price that the real-world diplomatic response did not extract. The emotional appeal of this offering is undeniable, and its commercial success demonstrates that the audience responded to it with an enthusiasm that validated the franchise’s creative choices.

But the emotional appeal does not resolve the ethical question. The transformation of real suffering into fictional catharsis involves a displacement of reality that can function as either healing or denial, depending on how the audience processes the transaction. If the audience experiences the franchise’s fictional revenge as a complement to their own ongoing emotional processing of the real events, the fictionalization functions as a form of cultural therapy, providing an emotional outlet for feelings that the real-world political response did not satisfy. If the audience experiences the fictional revenge as a substitute for real-world accountability, the fictionalization functions as a form of cultural escapism that replaces the difficult work of processing real events with the easier satisfaction of consuming fictional resolution. The franchise does not determine which of these functions it performs; that determination is made by each individual viewer, and the ethical evaluation of the franchise depends on which function predominates across the audience as a whole.

The ethical tension is sharpened by the franchise’s commercial context. Dhurandhar is not a documentary or a memorial; it is a commercial entertainment product that charges admission and generates profit from its engagement with real suffering. The commercial dimension does not automatically render the fictionalization exploitative, just as the commercial success of Schindler’s List or United 93 does not automatically render those films’ engagements with the Holocaust and September 11 exploitative. But the commercial dimension does require that the ethical evaluation account for the profit motive alongside the artistic and cultural motivations that inform the creative choices. The franchise’s creators may have been motivated by a genuine desire to engage with national trauma in a meaningful way, but they were also motivated by the commercial opportunity that the material presented, and the ethical evaluation must acknowledge both motivations without assuming that either one is exclusively determinative.

The comparison with other works that have used real terrorist attacks as material for commercial entertainment is instructive. Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which dramatized the hijacking of the fourth plane on September 11, was praised for its restraint and its refusal to provide fictional consolation for a real tragedy. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatized the hunt for Osama bin Laden following the September 11 attacks, was both praised for its procedural intensity and criticized for its political perspective and its depiction of enhanced interrogation. Both films engaged with the ethical questions of fictionalization more directly than the Dhurandhar franchise does, and both generated debates about the appropriate boundaries between historical testimony and commercial entertainment that parallel the debates the franchise has inspired. The comparison reveals that the ethical questions raised by the Dhurandhar franchise are not unique to Hindi cinema or to Indian culture but are inherent in the genre of historical thriller wherever it engages with real events of mass trauma, and that the critical community’s response to these questions reflects broader uncertainties about the role of commercial entertainment in the cultural processing of collective suffering.

The franchise also raises ethical questions about the fictionalization of real people, particularly the character inspired by the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan. The real officer’s family filed no public objection to the portrayal, but the family of Major Mohit Sharma, another figure whose career parallels certain elements of the fictional narrative, did seek legal intervention to prevent the film’s release, arguing that their son’s story could not be portrayed without consent. The legal challenge was unsuccessful, but it highlighted the tension between the freedom of artistic expression and the rights of real individuals whose lives provide the raw material for fictional narratives. The franchise operates in the legally permissible space between biography and fiction, borrowing enough from real lives to create the resonance of authenticity while changing enough to maintain the distance that legal precedent requires. Whether this legally permissible space is also ethically satisfactory is a question that the franchise’s commercial success does not answer.

The question of consent is particularly acute in the case of deceased individuals, who cannot grant or withhold permission for the use of their lives in fictional narratives. The real Chaudhry Aslam Khan was assassinated, and his transformation into a fictional character in a commercial entertainment was a decision made without his input by filmmakers whose priorities are artistic and commercial rather than memorial. The real Rehman Dakait was killed in circumstances that remain disputed, and his transformation into a fictional antagonist played by a Bollywood star involves a further layer of ethical complexity: the fictionalization assigns dramatic qualities to a real person who cannot contest the characterization and whose surviving family may experience the fictional portrayal as a distortion of the person they knew. These questions do not have clear answers, and the franchise does not attempt to address them, but their existence should be acknowledged by any analysis that takes the franchise’s engagement with reality seriously.

The broader ethical question that encompasses all the specific concerns discussed above is whether the franchise’s use of real events serves or disserves the public understanding of the historical period it depicts. If the franchise enhances the public understanding by drawing attention to real events, by encouraging viewers to learn about the historical background, and by generating cultural conversation about the significance of these events, then the fictionalization serves a public educational function that mitigates its ethical costs. If the franchise distorts the public understanding by replacing complex historical reality with simplified fictional narrative, by encouraging viewers to accept the franchise’s political framing as historical truth, and by substituting fictional catharsis for genuine engagement with unresolved national trauma, then the fictionalization disserves the public understanding in ways that its commercial success may actually amplify. The evidence supports both possibilities simultaneously, making the ethical evaluation of the franchise genuinely uncertain rather than clearly resolvable in either direction.

Where the Franchise Falls Short

The franchise’s engagement with real events, while artistically impressive, contains significant shortcomings that serious analysis must acknowledge rather than excuse.

The most significant shortcoming is the franchise’s treatment of Pakistani civilian life, which is reduced to a backdrop for the Indian operational narrative in ways that flatten the complexity of a country with over 200 million people into a setting for espionage fiction. The real Lyari is a neighborhood with a history, a culture, and a population whose lives extend far beyond the criminal dynamics that the franchise depicts. Pakistani sociologists and journalists have criticized the film’s portrayal as fantasy, noting that the depiction of Lyari as primarily a criminal ecosystem ignores the neighborhood’s cultural richness, its community structures, and the ordinary lives of its residents who are neither criminals nor operatives. The franchise’s focus on the criminal dimension of Lyari, while narratively necessary for the spy-thriller framework, produces a depiction that is instrumentally useful but representationally incomplete, using the suffering and complexity of a real community as raw material for a fictional narrative without providing the community the representational fullness it deserves.

The representational limitation extends beyond Lyari to Pakistan as a whole. The franchise’s Pakistan is populated almost exclusively by criminals, militants, intelligence operatives, and civilians who exist primarily as witnesses to or victims of the conflicts between these other groups. The country’s vibrant civil society, its artistic and intellectual culture, its democratic traditions and political diversity, and the complexity of its population’s relationship with the security dynamics the franchise depicts are absent from the narrative, not because the filmmakers are unaware of these dimensions but because the genre framework does not require them and the narrative structure does not accommodate them. The result is a depiction that is cinematically effective but culturally reductive, offering the audience a Pakistan that serves the dramatic needs of the Indian espionage narrative but that does not represent the country with the complexity that the gravity of the subject matter demands.

The franchise’s causal chain, while dramatically compelling, oversimplifies the historical relationships between the events it depicts. The real connections between the Kandahar release, the Parliament attack, and the Mumbai attacks involve multiple organizations with competing agendas, state actors with complex motivations, years of intelligence successes and failures, and geopolitical dynamics that resist the clean causality the franchise imposes. The franchise’s suggestion that a direct line runs from Kandahar through Parliament to 26/11, while containing elements of truth, flattens a complex web of causation into a simple chain that serves the dramatic architecture at the expense of historical nuance. The flattening is artistically defensible within the conventions of the genre, but it should be recognized as a creative choice rather than as a historical statement.

The simplification of causation has consequences that extend beyond the specific events the franchise depicts, because it trains the audience to think about geopolitics in terms of simple causal chains rather than complex causal networks. The real world of intelligence, terrorism, and statecraft involves feedback loops, unintended consequences, competing objectives, and systemic dynamics that resist the linear narratives that commercial entertainment requires. By presenting a simplified version of these dynamics that resolves into a clear story with identifiable heroes, villains, and turning points, the franchise reinforces a mode of thinking about geopolitics that is accessible but inadequate, satisfying but misleading. This is not a unique failing of the Dhurandhar franchise; it is a structural limitation of the historical thriller genre as a whole. But the franchise’s specific position as the most commercially successful Indian engagement with these events means that its simplified narrative will shape the understanding of more people than a more nuanced treatment could reach, making the simplification’s consequences proportionally more significant.

The franchise’s political framing, which consistently presents earlier governmental responses as failures and later governmental approaches as successes, reflects a specific political perspective that the films present as self-evident rather than as one interpretation among several. The real political responses to the events the franchise depicts involved complex calculations of strategic interest, diplomatic consequence, and institutional capability that the franchise’s binary framework of failure versus success does not accommodate. The diplomatic response to 26/11, which the franchise frames as inadequate, was a considered strategic choice made by officials who weighed the potential consequences of military retaliation against the potential consequences of restraint, and the franchise’s dismissal of this calculation as mere weakness represents a political judgment that the film presents as historical fact.

The political framing is perhaps the franchise’s most consequential shortcoming, because it operates through narrative structure rather than through explicit advocacy, making it more persuasive and more difficult to challenge than an explicit political statement would be. An explicit political argument can be engaged with, contested, and refuted through counterargument. A political perspective embedded in narrative structure operates below the level of conscious political engagement, shaping the audience’s understanding of the historical period through the arrangement of events and the characterization of officials rather than through arguments that the audience can evaluate on their merits. The franchise’s political perspective is not wrong in the sense that the opposing perspective is not also defensible; it is wrong in the sense that it presents itself as the only reasonable reading of the historical period, foreclosing the debate that a more honest engagement with the material would invite.

The treatment of intelligence operations, while dramatically effective, glamorizes a form of activity that involves significant moral costs that the franchise acknowledges in the abstract but does not explore with the depth that the subject demands. The real-world consequences of covert operations, including the collateral damage they produce, the moral injuries they inflict on the operatives who conduct them, and the institutional corruption they can generate, are more varied and more troubling than the franchise’s relatively contained depiction of these costs suggests. The franchise acknowledges that the operation has costs, particularly through the character arc of Hamza/Jaskirat, but it ultimately frames these costs as justified by the operational outcomes, a framing that the history of covert operations does not consistently support.

The glamorization is most visible in the franchise’s treatment of violence, which, despite Aditya Dhar’s commitment to consequential violence, ultimately serves a cathartic function that the real-world consequences of violence do not support. The action sequences are staged with enough realism to feel consequential but enough cinematic craft to remain thrilling, producing an aesthetic experience that is simultaneously grueling and gratifying. This dual quality, which is characteristic of the best action cinema, nevertheless creates a relationship between the audience and violence that is ethically ambiguous: the audience is asked to feel the weight of violence while also enjoying its cinematic execution, a combination that the real-world ethics of violence do not permit.

The Bigger Argument

The franchise’s reorganization of Indian security history into a single espionage narrative reveals something significant not only about the franchise itself but about the cultural moment that produced it and the audience that embraced it with record-breaking commercial enthusiasm.

The cultural function of the Dhurandhar franchise is to provide a narrative framework for processing two decades of national security trauma that the Indian public experienced as a series of separate, disconnected crises. The framework the franchise provides is one of connection and consequence: the events were connected, the consequences were predictable, and the failure to recognize these connections was itself the failure that the fictional operation corrects. This framework serves a psychological function that is independent of its historical accuracy: it transforms random, disconnected suffering into meaningful, connected narrative, providing the sense of coherence and causality that trauma inherently lacks. The human need for narrative coherence in the face of traumatic experience is well documented in psychological literature, and the franchise’s commercial success can be understood, in part, as the market expression of this need.

The psychological function of the franchise deserves further analysis because it illuminates the specific cultural conditions that produced the audience’s overwhelming response. India’s experience of terrorism over the past two decades has been characterized by a specific kind of frustration: the awareness that the threats are real, that the human costs are devastating, and that the institutional and diplomatic responses, however necessary, do not satisfy the emotional need for decisive action that the threats generate. This frustration has found expression in multiple cultural forms, from political rhetoric that emphasizes strength and decisiveness to social media discourse that demands more aggressive responses to security threats. The Dhurandhar franchise is the most commercially successful cultural expression of this frustration, and its success reflects not merely the quality of its filmmaking but the depth of the emotional need it addresses.

The franchise provides what might be called a narrative of efficacy: a story in which the institutional apparatus of the state, represented by the intelligence agencies and the political leadership that authorizes them, is capable of identifying threats, planning responses, and executing operations that produce decisive results. This narrative of efficacy contradicts the lived experience of two decades in which the institutional response to terrorism was characterized by diplomatic caution, political calculation, and outcomes that did not satisfy the public’s emotional demand for decisive action. The contradiction is the franchise’s primary cultural offering: it provides the narrative of efficacy that reality has denied, and the audience’s enthusiastic reception reflects the strength of their desire for this narrative.

The franchise’s cultural function is analogous to the function that Western films served in mid-twentieth-century American culture: providing narratives of individual efficacy and moral clarity in a cultural context characterized by institutional complexity and moral ambiguity. Like the Western, which provided American audiences with stories of heroic individuals who imposed order on chaotic frontiers through decisive action, the Dhurandhar franchise provides Indian audiences with stories of heroic operatives who impose national security on a chaotic geopolitical landscape through decisive intelligence work. The comparison is not exact, and the differences between the two genres reflect the different cultural contexts they serve, but the functional parallel is significant: both genres respond to a cultural need for narratives of efficacy that the complexity of reality cannot satisfy.

The franchise also reveals something about the evolution of Indian cinema’s engagement with national security themes. The comparison with earlier Bollywood treatments of similar material, analyzed in our Dhurandhar versus Bollywood spy thrillers article, shows a progression from simplistic, action-oriented depictions of espionage toward more complex, psychologically grounded narratives that engage with the moral costs of security work alongside its dramatic potential. The franchise does not complete this progression; as the shortcomings discussed above indicate, it retains significant elements of simplification and political advocacy that more nuanced treatments would avoid. But it advances the progression further than any previous Hindi commercial film, and its commercial success demonstrates that the audience is willing to engage with a level of complexity that the industry had previously assumed was commercially prohibitive.

The evolution from simplistic patriotic narratives to psychologically grounded security narratives reflects a broader maturation of the Indian audience that extends beyond cinema. The audience that responded to Dhurandhar with record-breaking attendance is an audience that has been shaped by two decades of exposure to sophisticated international content through streaming platforms, by a growing familiarity with the conventions of the espionage genre through Hollywood productions, and by an increasing awareness, through media coverage and public discourse, of the complexities of intelligence work and geopolitical dynamics. This audience is more sophisticated, more demanding, and more willing to engage with moral ambiguity than the audience that the Hindi film industry’s conventional commercial calculations had assumed, and the franchise’s commercial success is the empirical evidence that validates this assessment.

The question that the franchise ultimately poses but does not answer is whether the reorganization of history that it performs is an act of illumination or distortion. By connecting events that the historical experience presented as separate, the franchise reveals patterns and relationships that the disconnected experience of living through these events obscured. But it also imposes patterns and relationships that may not exist in the historical record, using the narrative conventions of the spy thriller to create connections that are dramatically satisfying but historically questionable. The franchise is both illumination and distortion, and its power lies precisely in the ambiguity between these two functions: it shows the audience something real about the connections between the events it depicts while simultaneously constructing those connections through the conventions of fiction. The audience must decide for themselves which function predominates, and the cultural conversation that the franchise has generated, including the controversies it has inspired, is itself evidence that the question is genuinely open.

The international dimension of the franchise’s engagement with real events adds another layer to the bigger argument. The franchise has been banned or restricted in several territories, and its reception in Pakistan has been characterized by the criticism that its depiction of Pakistani society is reductive and its linking of Lyari’s urban conflicts to Indian nationalist narratives is historically unjustified. These international responses are themselves significant cultural data, because they reveal the limits of the franchise’s narrative coherence: the causal chain that feels compelling and true to an Indian audience familiar with the events the franchise reorganizes may feel arbitrary and insulting to audiences who experienced the same events from a different national perspective. The franchise’s inability to sustain its narrative coherence across national boundaries is not a failure of filmmaking but a demonstration of the inherently perspectival nature of historical narrative: the same events, reorganized into the same narrative structure, produce different meanings when processed through different national experiences.

The franchise’s most significant cultural contribution may be the demonstration that commercial Hindi cinema can engage with real historical events at a level of specificity and seriousness that was previously the province of documentary and literary non-fiction. Whatever its shortcomings, whatever its political biases, and whatever ethical questions its fictionalization of real events raises, the franchise has produced a body of work that treats Indian security history as material worthy of serious dramatic engagement rather than as mere backdrop for action spectacle. The thematic depth of its engagement, the complexity of its characterizations, and the sophistication of its narrative structure distinguish it from the simplistic treatments of similar material that have historically dominated Hindi commercial cinema, and its commercial success validates the proposition that the Indian audience is ready for this level of engagement. You can compare the franchise’s historic commercial performance against other Bollywood releases to appreciate how profoundly the audience endorsed this approach to historical material.

The ultimate significance of the franchise’s engagement with real events may be not what it reveals about the events themselves but what it reveals about the cultural appetite for serious engagement with national history through the medium of commercial entertainment. The franchise has demonstrated that this appetite exists, that it is commercially significant, and that it can be addressed through the genre conventions of the spy thriller without sacrificing either the genre’s entertainment value or the history’s emotional gravity. This demonstration opens a creative space for future filmmakers who may wish to engage with other dimensions of Indian history through the medium of commercial cinema, and the creative possibilities that this space represents may prove to be the franchise’s most enduring legacy.

For additional context on how the franchise connects to the broader landscape of Bollywood spy cinema, see our detailed comparison in Dhurandhar versus Bollywood spy thrillers, and for the complete operational analysis of the fictional mission these real events inspired, see our article on Operation Dhurandhar explained.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which real events inspired the Dhurandhar franchise?

The franchise draws inspiration from multiple real events spanning approximately two decades of Indian geopolitical experience. The primary events include the IC-814 hijacking of 1999, in which militants took control of an Indian Airlines flight and secured the release of imprisoned terrorists including Masood Azhar; the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, which is connected to the organizations that the released militants subsequently established; the criminal dynamics of Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood, including the police operations led by the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan; and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks of 2008, which function as the franchise’s emotional climax. Additional contextual elements include the demonetisation policy and broader political transitions.

Q: Is S.P. Choudhary Aslam based on a real person?

The character played by Sanjay Dutt is inspired by the real Chaudhry Aslam Khan, a senior police officer in Karachi’s Sindh Police who led aggressive operations against criminal syndicates and militant organizations in Lyari. The real officer, dubbed “Pakistan’s toughest cop,” survived multiple assassination attempts before being killed in a car bomb attack on the Lyari Expressway when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into his convoy. The fictional character preserves the real officer’s operational fearlessness and institutional complexity while inventing personal dimensions that the historical record does not provide.

Q: Is Rehman Dakait in the film based on a real gangster?

The character shares his name with Abdul Rehman Baloch, known as Rehman Dakait, a real Lyari gangster who controlled significant criminal operations in the neighborhood. The real Rehman Dakait was killed in 2009 in what was alleged to be a police encounter staged by Chaudhry Aslam Khan. His wife publicly alleged that the encounter was fabricated. Akshaye Khanna’s portrayal borrows the name and the general criminal profile while creating a dramatically heightened character whose psychological depth exceeds what the historical record reveals about the real figure.

Q: How accurately does the franchise depict the IC-814 hijacking?

The franchise does not attempt a comprehensive dramatization of the IC-814 hijacking. Instead, it focuses on the political decision to release imprisoned militants in exchange for the hostages, framing this decision as a national humiliation that reverberates through the entire narrative. The depiction is historically grounded in the real events but selective in its emphasis, prioritizing the moments that serve the franchise’s narrative argument over a balanced representation of the full crisis, including the complex diplomatic pressures that influenced the decision.

Q: Is Ajay Sanyal based on a real intelligence officer?

The character played by R. Madhavan is inspired by a real intelligence figure whose career trajectory and operational philosophy parallel the fictional character’s arc. The franchise does not identify this inspiration by name, maintaining a distance between fiction and reality. The fictional Sanyal borrows the professional trajectory of his real-world inspiration while inventing the personal characteristics and specific moral compromises that make him a dramatic character rather than a biographical portrait.

Q: How does the franchise handle the 26/11 Mumbai attacks?

The franchise uses the Mumbai attacks as its emotional and dramatic climax, deploying specific elements of the real attacks, including reconstructions of the satellite phone communications and references to the television footage that the nation watched in real time, to evoke the emotional impact of the event. The approach is selective rather than exhaustive, providing enough historical specificity to ground the emotional response while avoiding a comprehensive recreation that could reduce real suffering to entertainment spectacle. The franchise positions 26/11 as the consequence of the institutional failures that the earlier origin events established.

Q: Does the franchise take political sides in its depiction of events?

The franchise presents a specific political interpretation that frames earlier governmental responses to terrorism as failures and later governmental approaches as more decisive. This interpretation reflects a particular political perspective that has been advanced in Indian public discourse but is contested by many analysts. The franchise presents this interpretation as self-evident rather than as one perspective among several, which is one of the primary sources of controversy surrounding its release.

Q: How does demonetisation factor into the franchise’s narrative?

The franchise incorporates demonetisation as a contextual element that connects financial policy to national security operations, suggesting that the policy served not only its officially stated economic purposes but also functioned as a tool disrupting the financial networks that sustained cross-border terrorism. This interpretation represents a specific political reading that has been advanced by some security analysts but challenged by many economists.

Q: What is the relationship between the real Operation Lyari and the film?

The real Operation Lyari was a series of law enforcement operations in Karachi’s Lyari neighborhood targeting criminal syndicates and militant groups. The most prominent of these operations was the 2012 grand operation that aimed to clear the area of entrenched criminal networks. The franchise uses the dynamics of these operations as the setting for its fictional narrative, borrowing the real-world complexity of the criminal-police-political interactions in Lyari to create the operational environment in which the undercover mission unfolds.

Q: Has Pakistan reacted to the franchise’s use of real events?

Pakistani sociologists, journalists, and academics have criticized the franchise’s depiction of Lyari as fantasy, arguing that it reduces a complex neighborhood to a criminal setting and links urban Pakistani conflicts to Indian nationalist narratives in ways that are historically unjustified. Some residents of Lyari have also objected to the portrayal of their neighborhood. Others have noted that the franchise’s depiction of gang rivalries in Karachi demonstrates a firm grasp of documented history, creating a polarized reception that mirrors the broader political divide the franchise operates within.

Q: How does the franchise handle the ethics of fictionalizing real traumas?

The franchise does not explicitly address the ethics of its fictionalization, but its approach reveals an awareness of the sensitivity of the material. The selective depiction of 26/11, which evokes the emotional impact without attempting a comprehensive recreation, suggests a deliberate restraint that balances dramatic effectiveness with ethical consideration. The use of real people as character inspirations is handled through sufficient fictionalization to maintain legal distance while preserving enough specificity to create the resonance of authenticity.

Q: What role does the Kandahar hostage release play in the franchise’s argument?

The Kandahar hostage release functions as the franchise’s inciting incident, the moment of institutional failure that creates the conditions for everything that follows. The franchise’s argument is that the decision to release the militants, including the man who would found Jaish-e-Mohammed, was the origin point of a cascading sequence of security failures that culminated in the Mumbai attacks. This argument contains elements of historical truth but involves significant simplification of the complex, multi-causal relationships between the events.

Q: Is the franchise propaganda or legitimate historical fiction?

This question has been at the center of the debate surrounding the franchise since its release. The franchise contains elements of both: it uses real events and genuine historical analysis to construct a narrative that also serves specific political perspectives. The distinction between propaganda and historical fiction is not binary but spectral, and the franchise occupies a position on that spectrum that reasonable viewers can evaluate differently based on their own political perspectives and their standards for historical accuracy in commercial entertainment.

Q: How does the franchise compare to other films based on Indian security events?

The franchise represents a significant evolution from earlier Bollywood treatments of similar material. Previous films like Uri addressed specific operations with patriotic intensity but limited complexity, while films like Baby and Raazi engaged with espionage material at a more intimate scale. Dhurandhar combines the scale of the former with the psychological depth of the latter while adding a historical scope that neither predecessor attempted, creating a form of security-themed cinema that is unprecedented in Hindi commercial filmmaking.

Q: What historical liberties does the franchise take with the timeline?

The franchise’s most significant historical liberty is the compression of events that occurred across approximately two decades into a single operational timeline. This compression eliminates the intervals of normalcy between crises, creating an impression of continuous assault that the historical record does not support. The compression serves the dramatic architecture by maintaining narrative momentum and justifying the sustained operation, but it should be recognized as a creative choice rather than as a historical claim.

Q: How do the real-world figures who inspired the characters differ from their fictional versions?

The fictional versions are consistently more singular, more psychologically articulate, and more dramatically heightened than the historical record suggests their real-world inspirations were. The real Chaudhry Aslam Khan was a complex figure whose contradictions resist the dramatic coherence that the fictional Aslam achieves. The real intelligence figures who inspire Sanyal operated within institutional constraints and collaborative structures that the franchise’s more individualistic depiction of intelligence leadership does not fully represent. These differences are functions of the genre rather than failures of research.

Q: What is the most controversial aspect of the franchise’s use of real events?

The most controversial aspect is the franchise’s use of 26/11 as the emotional climax of a commercial entertainment narrative. The transformation of a terrorist attack that killed 166 people into the pivot point of a fictional revenge story raises questions about the ethics of using real mass-casualty events as raw material for entertainment, questions that the franchise’s commercial success does not resolve and that remain subjects of legitimate debate in Indian cultural discourse. The controversy extends beyond the specific use of 26/11 to the broader question of whether the franchise’s reorganization of two decades of national security history into a single espionage narrative serves or disserves the public understanding of that history, and whether the narrative coherence the franchise provides is illumination or distortion of the complex, multi-causal reality it depicts.

Q: How does the franchise’s treatment of real events compare to Hollywood films like Zero Dark Thirty?

Both the Dhurandhar franchise and Zero Dark Thirty use real terrorist attacks as the emotional foundation for fictional operational narratives, and both have generated debates about the appropriate boundaries between historical testimony and commercial entertainment. The key difference is in the temporal scope: Zero Dark Thirty focuses on the hunt for a single target following a single catalyzing event, while Dhurandhar compresses two decades of events into a single operational narrative that argues for connections between multiple crises. Both films have been criticized for presenting specific political perspectives as self-evident, and both have been praised for the seriousness of their engagement with real security events. The comparison reveals that the ethical and political questions raised by the franchise are not unique to Indian cinema but are inherent in the genre wherever it engages with real events of mass trauma.

Q: What happened to the real IC-814 hijackers after the Kandahar crisis?

The five hijackers were released along with the three militants and disappeared into Pakistan. One of them, Zahoor Mistry, who was responsible for the murder of passenger Rupin Katyal during the hijacking, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Karachi in early 2022. The franchise references this assassination in its narrative, incorporating it into the broader web of events that connects the Kandahar crisis to subsequent developments. The released militant Masood Azhar went on to found Jaish-e-Mohammed, an organization that has been linked to numerous subsequent attacks against India, including the Parliament attack and the Pulwama attack, making the Kandahar release one of the most consequential decisions in India’s modern security history.

Q: How does the franchise handle the character inspired by the real intelligence figure behind Ajay Sanyal?

The franchise maintains a careful distance between the fictional Sanyal and his real-world inspiration, borrowing the professional trajectory and operational philosophy while inventing the personal characteristics, emotional life, and specific moral compromises. R. Madhavan’s performance creates a character who is both historically resonant and fictionally autonomous, a figure whose institutional position and strategic vision echo the real intelligence figure while whose human vulnerabilities and dramatic arc are the creation of the filmmakers. The franchise’s treatment is legally prudent and artistically useful, creating the resonance of real-world authority without the constraints of biographical accuracy.

Q: What role does the real Rehman Dakait’s assassination play in the franchise?

The real Rehman Dakait, whose full name was Abdul Rehman Baloch, was killed in 2009 in what was alleged to be a police encounter staged by Chaudhry Aslam Khan. His wife publicly alleged the encounter was fabricated, and the Sindh High Court ordered an FIR against Aslam. The franchise incorporates the dynamics of this relationship, between a powerful criminal figure and an aggressive law enforcement officer, into its narrative fabric, using the historically documented tension between Rehman and Aslam as the foundation for the fictional relationship between Akshaye Khanna’s character and Sanjay Dutt’s character. The specificity of this historical parallel gives the fictional relationship a grounding in documented reality that enhances its dramatic credibility.

Q: How did residents of the real Lyari react to the franchise’s depiction?

Pakistani journalists, academics, and some Lyari residents criticized the franchise’s depiction as inaccurate and reductive. Pakistani sociologist Nida Kirmani, who has research expertise on Lyari, described the film’s depiction as “completely based on fantasy” and called it “bizarre” that the film chose to cast Lyari gangs into geopolitical tensions with India. Journalists and academics criticized the linking of Lyari’s urban conflicts to the Mumbai attacks as an attempt to fold Pakistani urban complexity into Indian nationalist imagination. These criticisms highlight the representational limitations of the franchise’s engagement with a real community whose lived experience extends far beyond the criminal dynamics the franchise depicts.

Q: What does the franchise suggest about the relationship between demonetisation and national security?

The franchise weaves demonetisation into its narrative as a tool that disrupted the financial networks sustaining cross-border terrorism by invalidating the physical currency these networks depended upon. This framing presents demonetisation as a multi-purpose policy with national security dimensions alongside its stated economic objectives. The interpretation reflects a specific political reading that has been advanced by some security analysts but contested by many economists, and the franchise’s incorporation of this reading into its narrative is consistent with its broader pattern of adopting interpretations that support the premise of coordinated, decisive governmental action.

Q: Is the franchise’s depiction of RAW and IB operations realistic?

The franchise borrows enough from the documented culture and methodology of India’s intelligence agencies to create procedural plausibility while necessarily fictionalizing specific operations and capabilities for dramatic purposes and security reasons. The institutional dynamics the franchise depicts, including inter-agency rivalries, political oversight, and the tension between operational ambition and institutional caution, are recognizable to analysts familiar with Indian intelligence bureaucracy. The specific operation depicted, a decade-long solo infiltration of a foreign criminal organization, represents a dramatic exaggeration of the kind of operations that intelligence agencies conduct, but the institutional framework within which the operation occurs reflects documented organizational realities with sufficient accuracy to create the impression of procedural authenticity.