As the Hindi-language film Dhurandhar is breaking all Indian box office records, it was a strange coincidence to watch it and The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, a Hindi-language web series, in the same week. Both pieces of media deal with monumental terrorist attacks, the related national security challenges and the maze of India’s governmental agencies. 

However, there is a yawning gap between the approaches taken by the makers of The Hunt and Dhurandhar that couldn’t have been starker. It is worth examining Dhurandhar and The Hunt for their logical consistencies, their comparisons to Hollywood franchises and what the creation of such media indicates about the future of the prevailing pseudo-nationalist narrative in India.

Two stories, two perspectives

The Hunt follows the events after the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the subsequent investigation. Rajiv Gandhi was killed on May 21, 1991, by a suicide bomber belonging to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE was an insurgent group that sought to establish an independent Tamil state.

While The Hunt doesn’t hit the high-water mark of Adolescence, another procedural smash hit of 2025, it faithfully depicts the inter-agency friction that happens when multiple personalities with overlapping jurisdictions and constitutionally or statutorily limited powers collaborate in national interest. There are occasional mentions of political dithering, but the final product ends up highlighting the true nationalism of dedicated investigators during the politically tumultuous India of the 1990s.

Dhurandhar, on the other hand, makes a mockery of India’s institutions. It does this by linking the movie’s fictional, sensationalized events to real-life tragedies such as the hijacking of IC-814 by militants linked to Pakistan-based Islamist group Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, as well as the 26/11 Mumbai attacks orchestrated by terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. In particular, the fictional portrayal of Ajit Doval, India’s current National Security Advisor, is another insult to viewers’ intelligence and basic understanding of history and civics.

The hypocrisy of the on-screen Ajit Doval bashing the previous Congress-led administration would have been tragic if it were not comically illogical. This is the same Vajpayee-led administration that seemingly kept funding his undercover operation in order to demonstrate institutional maturity in national security matters.

In the film, the character of Ajay Sanyal is inspired by Doval. He is portrayed as the only bureaucrat in the sprawling military establishment who cares about the country and, at the same time, as an arbiter of others’ nationalism. He is the one who sends the film’s main character, Hamza Ali Mazari, into Pakistan as an undercover spy.

In one of the scenes, Mazari is seen riding a motorcycle while drunk. Behavior such as this would be a red flag for any spy handler, but not for the juvenile caricature of Doval. Given the embarrassing details that have emerged from the botched assassination plot against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwat Singh Pannun on American soil by hired gun Nikhil Gupta, perhaps a drunk, bike-riding spy in Pakistan is a fitting tribute to the incompetence demonstrated by the Indian government. Logic, it seems, is the first casualty of pseudo-nationalism.

Despite such glaring holes, several commentators have jumped on the Dhurandhar bandwagon by comparing it to Western military propaganda spread by franchises such as Top Gun and the Bourne trilogy. Dhurandhar’s financial success might have tapped into the cultural demand for India’s own James Bond. However, there is a difference: most of the other global franchises it is being compared to are outward-looking. They might occasionally criticize their own national security establishments or utilize rogue spy characters to highlight a country’s political values, but Western global franchises rarely elevate one politician at the expense of all other previous leaders of the home country.

Similarly, making the fictionalized Doval claim that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is directly or indirectly responsible for all the terrorist attacks in the world has no comparison in any of the above-mentioned global hits. While monolithic in their portrayal of Western democracies as the good guys, the films don’t assume that their audiences are stupid or naïve regarding history. 

The Hunt is more similar to Western military films than Dhurandhar is. Not because of its content, but because of its approach in portraying government responses and procedures. In addressing the complexities of LTTE terrorism, The Hunt aspires to drag typical Indian black-and-white, no shades of grey storytelling towards more nuanced Western military propaganda films such as Black Hawk Down. In comparison, by making the Doval-inspired character deliver childish lines, Dhurandhar does a disservice to decades of rich Indian history of espionage, showing it in a poor light. It truly is a bastion of pseudo-nationalism.

Connecting the dots shouldn’t be difficult

As an advocate of freedom of expression, I defend the right of the creators of The Hunt and Dhurandhar to make any kind of content. In return, instead of tracing the success of Dhurandhar to the supposed demise of outdated, elitist gatekeepers of entertainment in the New India, it would help if the supporters of Dhurandhar could address a few issues. 

First, they should address why the government of this mythical New India, particularly the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), has not changed its decades-old habit of content censorship since assuming power in 2014. India banned the BBC’s documentary on Narendra Modi in 2023, even going so far as to block people from circulating clips on social media. Similarly, the CBFC continues to order inordinate amounts of — often inane — cuts to films such as Homebound, All India Rank and countless others since 2014. When it comes to censorship in India, the way George Orwell ended his classic Animal Farm is instructive: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

However, after a decade or so of similar propaganda efforts in the media, Dhurandhar should not come as a surprise. The sequel has been predictably teed up to be released on the eve of the upcoming West Bengal state elections. Given the mechanics of film production, it makes one wonder whether Operation Sindoor — India’s military response to the latest terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir — happened in the middle of the making of the two-part saga. This would have most likely forced the filmmakers to stretch the first film to almost three-and-a-half hours to ensure the latest operation would be accommodated in the sequel.

Since the caricature of Doval in Dhurandhar has been bizarrely lamenting the lack of nationalism in any previous leaders and waiting for the messiah to arrive, it is safe to assume that Modi will make a grand entry in the second edition. He will most likely magically justify the botched 2016 demonetization while simultaneously ushering in a mythical New India that eliminates the scourge of Pakistani terrorism with cross-border strikes. Just don’t ask questions about the ever-changing justification of demonetization by Modi in its immediate aftermath, or the fact that Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil resigned after taking moral responsibility for the 26/11 attack, while neither the Home Minister nor the National Security Advisor has resigned after multiple terrorist attacks since 2014. 

There is one thing audiences can be sure of: In the nuance-free world of Dhurandhar, India’s geopolitical and political reality will be nowhere on the radar. One can only hope that other filmmakers follow the lead of The Hunt and pick more historic events in the recent past to make realistic, respectable content.

Until then, viewers will have to contend with the reality not shown in Dhurandhar. Mukesh Ambani, owner of the Reliance group that runs Dhurandhar’s production house Jio Studio, was worth $62 billion in 2014 and is now worth over $98 billion in 2025. Ambani exists in a time when 800 million (80 crore) Indian citizens are below the poverty line, making them eligible for Modi’s free monthly food rations. As net foreign investments in India are crashing, even Indian companies are not investing in expanding domestically. For the gainfully employed, inflation has far outpaced wage growth in the past decade. And with hundreds of unemployed young Indians showing up for every government job opening, sometimes even graduate degree holders have to accept clerical jobs.

When you cannot provide your fellow citizens the dignity of a decent job and two square meals, you have to keep feeding them pseudo-nationalism. In this case, it comes in the form of Dhurandhar.

[Cheyenne Torres edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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