Opinion | 26/11 To UP Mafia: How Dhurandhar Rewinds Dark Chapters Of UPA Era

The films portray the UPA era, especially 2004–2014, as a time of national vulnerability, weak governance, intelligence failures, and unchecked Pakistan-backed terrorism.

Sometimes, our past creeps up on us like a monster from a nightmare. It happens to nations as well. Germany’s Third Reich, Russia’s Stalinist gulags, China’s Great Leap Forward or America’s Great Depression, for instance.

For independent India, it was the Age of Terror — the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s (barring economic liberalisation) — in which politics of ‘secularism’ created a fertile marketplace for jihad, fake currency, drugs, and separatism.

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Aditya Dhar’s 2025–2026 espionage thriller, the Dhurandhar duology, brings those memories rushing.

The films portray the UPA era, especially 2004–2014, as a time of national vulnerability, weak governance, intelligence failures, and unchecked Pakistan-backed terrorism. It is impossible to shrug it off as BJP propaganda because of two reasons: a. Facts and figures support it b. It also shows how the BJP-led Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave in to coalition pressures during the 1999 Kandahar IC-814 hijack by releasing three terrorists including Masood Azhar.

Facts leave no room for manipulation. During and after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks which killed 166 people, the Congress government’s pussyfooting, attempts to create the bogey of ‘Hindu terror’, and complete failure to respond with force are well-documented. So are more than 60 major terror attacks by Pakistan-based groups which shook India between 2004–2014, according to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal and MHA records.

Pakistan’s economic warfare using fake Indian currency, carried out through mafia networks like Atiq Ahmed’s in Uttar Pradesh, are reflected in RBI annual reports between 2008 and 2016, which showed a sharp rise in counterfeit notes. Both Indian agencies and the US State Department accused Pakistan’s ISI of state-sponsored counterfeiting to fund terror and destabilise the economy.

But if the 2016 demonetisation took the steam out of it, the arrival of Yogi Adityanath as the CM bludgeoned and buried organised crime and terror. Dhurandhar: The Revenge shows how Atiq Ahmed ran his writ and how it ended with hot steel in his skull. Both the original and the sequel mirrors the radical transformation of UP under Yogi from lawless badlands to a state that will stop at nothing to finish the mafia, rioters (there were over 200 recorded communal riots during Akhilesh Yadav’s tenure), and terrorists.

The films portray, rightly, a spate of intelligence failures coupled with chronic lack of government will to tackle terror. Official inquiries into 26/11 and books like The Siege by Adrian Levy highlight coordination failures between IB, R&AW, and state police.

Overall, Dhurandhar eloquently captures the pain and anxiety the nation suffered because of the timidity, corruption, and hypocrisy of the UPA era. The generation that lived it is still active and alive. The Narendra Modi government would not need to waste its PR budget to remind hundreds of millions of Indians of that very long night.

(Abhijit Majumder is the author of the book, ‘India’s New Right’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.)

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