Dhurandhar - A Film Did What the Indian State Refused To

How Nehruvian Dogma Blinded a Nation to Its Primary Threat

Dhurandhar as a cinematic intervention works because it does what the Indian State has refused to do for decades: tell Indians the truth about Pakistan—not as a geopolitical abstraction, but as an ideological project.

The embarrassment is not that such films are being made. The embarrassment is that they are necessary at all.

For nearly eight decades, the Indian Republic has failed in a basic sovereign duty: to educate its own citizens about the nature of the adversary it was born alongside. In that vacuum, a blockbuster film has now stepped in to perform what should have been a sustained institutional effort—across textbooks, diplomacy, media, and statecraft.

What Dhurandhar reveals—sometimes bluntly, sometimes dramatically—is not new. It is foundational. Pakistan is not merely a state that has taken “wrong turns.” It is a state conceived in ideological hostility, sustained through it, and legitimized by it.

At its core lies Islamic supremacism—not as a fringe distortion, but as a structuring principle. The very imagination of Pakistan as a “new Medina” is not rhetorical flourish. It is theological intent. Medina represents consolidation, expansion, and eventual triumph over the “ignorant” pre-existing order—jahiliya. In that framework, Hindus are not political rivals but religious & civilizational adversaries—ultimately to be brought into Islam by any means necessary: conquest, coercion, persuasion, or deceit.

This is why the routine abduction and forced conversion of minor Hindu girls in Pakistan is not treated as a societal aberration, but often as a morally sanctioned act. The logic is chillingly consistent: a kafir “saved” through conversion to Islam is a soul redeemed. One cannot understand Pakistani society without confronting this moral inversion.

Layered atop this is the iron grip of the Army–ISI–mullah–terror nexus. It is fashionable in Indian discourse to separate “the Pakistani people” from “the Pakistani state.” Dhurandhar disrupts this convenient fiction. The nexus does not merely govern Pakistan; it shapes its social consciousness. From textbooks to mosques to media, the ideological conditioning is systemic.

And yet, even this apparatus consumes its own. Baloch dissidents disappear. Hazara Shias are massacred. Pashtuns are profiled and crushed. The pathology that targets Hindus externally corrodes Muslim minorities internally.

None of this is obscure. What is obscure is why the Indian State chose to obscure it.

For decades, Nehruvian secularism and its later liberal-globalist variants reframed the India–Pakistan conflict into something almost banal: a territorial dispute, a tragic misunderstanding, a problem of “extremists on both sides.” This flattening was not accidental—it was ideological. Acknowledging the religious-civilizational basis of Partition would have unsettled the moral architecture of the postcolonial Indian elite.

So history was edited.

Memories of Partition and its causes were not merely forgotten; they were deliberately blurred. Liberal narratives buried the deep pre-Partition Muslim debates on a separate Islamic political destiny and tried instead to hang the ‘two-nation theory’ around Savarkar’s neck, while minimizing the Muslim League’s own ideological case for a distinct Muslim nation. Even a figure like Maulana Azad opposed Partition less as a repudiation of Islamic civilizational ambition and more from the fear that it would embitter Hindus, damage Islam’s legitimacy in India, and obstruct the longer-term goal of winning the whole subcontinent for Islam by gradual political and cultural ascendancy rather than by a single cartographic rupture.

The 1971 genocide—where millions of Bengalis were slaughtered and women raped by the Pakistani Army—was diplomatically “resolved” but civilizationally buried. No Nuremberg followed. No moral vocabulary was developed. Pakistani POWs were treated as “brother soldiers,” while their victims were denied even the dignity of sustained remembrance.

Cultural institutions—academia, cinema, media—internalized this erasure. Generations of Indians grew up with more nuanced understandings of European fascism than of the ideology that created Pakistan.

Dhurandhar also punctures another carefully curated myth: that Indian Muslims, in some collective civilizational sense, “rejected” the idea of Pakistan. The reality is more complex and less comforting. Partition was not followed by a structured population exchange, despite serious advocacy from figures like Dr. Ambedkar. The result was a subcontinent where the ideological question remained unresolved, merely displaced.

Instead of addressing that question, Indian liberals pretend it doesn’t exist and indulge in a different kind of deadly obfuscation. Just like the Pakistani State is whitewashed, Indian Islamists are presented as the face of Indian Muslims, and this conflation, which disguises Islamist appeasement as minority protection, ends up marginalizing and harming precisely those progressive Muslim voices who challenge that extremism from within.

Dhurandhar forces this evasion into the open. The film’s depiction of figures like Atiq Ahmed is not incidental—it points to the uneasy coexistence of Islamism, criminality, and “secular” political patronage within the Republic. That such portrayals feel “bold” only reveals how narrow the permissible discourse has been.

What is perhaps most striking is that even governments that politically opposed Nehruvian frameworks have not systematically replaced them. There has been no sustained national effort to document and disseminate the realities of Pakistan’s internal repression: the daily conversions of Hindu girls, temple desecrations, blasphemy lynchings, bonded labor systems, or the ethnic subjugation of non-Punjabi populations.

Contrast this with other states.

The United Kingdom and United States built an entire intellectual and cultural apparatus to understand and oppose Nazism and later Soviet communism. South Korea does not equivocate about the nature of the North Korean regime—it educates its citizens relentlessly. Israel embeds historical memory and threat awareness into its civic fabric. China, too, ensures that the century of humiliation at the hands of European powers and the crimes of Japanese colonialism are never allowed to fade from public memory. Vietnam, after decades of conflict, maintains clarity about external domination.

These societies do not confuse moral clarity with hatred. They understand that awareness is a prerequisite for survival.

India, uniquely, pathologized such clarity.

To speak plainly about Pakistan’s ideological foundations is to risk being labeled a “hater.” To demand accountability is to be lectured on “humanity.” Meanwhile, calls for boycotts or strategic firmness are judicially and culturally delegitimized, even as open expressions in support of Pakistan are defended under the same liberal framework.

This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a deeper condition: a postcolonial state still mediated by comprador elites—classes whose legitimacy derives not from civilizational rootedness but from alignment with global ideological currents. For such elites, a confident, historically conscious Hindu majority is not a foundation—it is a problem to be managed, diluted, and “reformed.”

In that project, confusion is a tool.

Dhurandhar disrupts that confusion. It does not invent new truths; it restores old ones to visibility. That alone makes it politically and culturally significant.

But cinema cannot substitute for statecraft.

If Pakistan, in its current ideological form, poses an existential threat—not just militarily but civilizationally—then the response cannot be episodic or outsourced to filmmakers. It requires institutional will: curricular reform, diplomatic assertiveness, global advocacy on human rights abuses, and an unambiguous articulation of India’s own civilizational ethos.

Deradicalizing Pakistan is not merely a strategic necessity; it is a moral one. Ordinary Pakistanis are as much victims of this ideological machine as its instruments. But deradicalization begins with recognition—and recognition begins at home.

The real question Dhurandhar leaves us with is not about Pakistan.

It is about India.

When did it become “hate” to clearly see those who hate you? And what does it say about a Republic that must rely on cinema to recover the courage to see?

Disclosure: This article was researched, drafted, and refined with AI assistance (Perplexity AI). All facts, framing, and final edits reflect the author’s vision, voice, and accountability. The featured image was generated with assistance of Google Gemini