Opinion | Why Dhurandhar Has Really Alarmed Pakistan |
Dhurandhar marks two distinct changes in India. First, filmmakers are no longer shying away from identifying the country behind terror attacks in India. Pakistan. And second, the portrayed response to Pakistan’s aggression and animosity is no longer Gandhian: it is muscular, assertive and just as devious and implacable. And Dhurandhar’s box office success is proof that filmmaker Aditya Dhar’s message has resonated resoundingly with millions of today’s Indians.
Dhurandhar underlines—in blood—how far India’s mood has moved on from the ‘Aman ki Asha’ mindset, the 2010 cross-border peace campaign spearheaded by two media houses, one Pakistani and one Indian, not even two years after the egregious attack by Pakistani terrorists on 26 November 2008 in Mumbai that left 166 people dead and over 300 injured. Irony and incongruity apart, the campaign found traction in the India of 2010; India of 2025 is different.
For years India has had to live with the knowledge that there are scores of traitors in our midst, working with and for Pakistan with the intention of hobbling India. Now Dhurandhar posits something that has profoundly alarmed and shaken Pakistan and its supporters in India: that there are imposters and traitors in their midst too. Even more sinisterly, it suggests that the rise of the ‘king of Lyari’, the feared Rehman Dakait, was due to a dhurandhar Indian agent.
And Dhar has chosen the locale well for this tale of perfidy within Pakistan: the restive province of Balochistan and the crime-ridden Lyari area of Karachi, a cultural outlier for the Punjabi Pakistani power elite even now because of its large population of Baloches........