Dhurandhar: A Thriller is Not a Tribunal
Entertainment—and the quiet rewriting of memory
A popular film can do two things at once: entertain and quietly rewrite collective public memory. When the subject is espionage, covert operations, and the national security state—domains where secrecy is intrinsic—cinema acquires a particular advantage. Audiences cannot easily verify what they are shown, and where verification is difficult, it becomes easier for dramatic suggestion to slide into unfair vilification. The line between “inspired by” and “this is what really happened” can then become dangerously thin, allowing fiction to be received as fact and insinuation to travel farther than evidence.
The current churn around Dhurandhar illustrates this problem. The objection is not to spy fiction. India needs strong spy cinema, and a free society must protect the artist’s right to dramatise. The real concern is the afterlife of such fiction: how a commercial thriller is being touted as near-documentary truth, and then used to defame unnamed officials and entire eras with insinuations that cannot be responsibly proven from a screenplay.
How ‘based on’ becomes ‘therefore true’
The most effective propaganda is rarely an outright lie; it is the ardh satya (अर्धसत्य)—a story stitched from enough plausibility to be repeated without scrutiny. Cinema exploits this instinctively, because plausibility is the currency of drama. But when political partisans and social media influencers circulate cinematic plot points as “hidden history”, entertainment starts to pass for evidence, and a screenplay is mistaken for a record.
That is precisely what happens when a film’s more sensational ideas—particularly those involving dramatic breaches of sensitive state systems—are repeated as if they were established fact. A thriller may compress events, merge characters, sharpen motives, and insert a single decisive act where the real world would reveal messy process, multiple actors, and partial outcomes. Audiences understand this in theory. The trouble is that, in practice, many viewers remember the emotion of certainty even when the basis for certainty was fictional.
The ‘currency plates’ trope and the logic of the modern state
One plot device being bandied about in public conversation is the notion of sensitive currency-related materials being handed over, sold, or compromised. It works brilliantly on screen: instantly intelligible, existentially frightening, and tailor-made for outrage. Yet the very plausibility of the idea should invite scepticism.
In the real state system, currency integrity is not guarded by one door and one guard. It is protected by layered procedures: controlled access, segmentation of roles, authorisation protocols, chain-of-custody discipline, and audit trails. This does not mean breaches are impossible. It means that if something of this magnitude genuinely occurred, it would almost certainly require multiple points of failure—procedural, operational, and human—rather than a single cinematic handover.
That distinction matters, because the post-film discourse often shifts from “this is a frightening scenario” to “this is what they did”, and then from “they” to a broad-brush defamation of whole institutions.
A retired officer’s unnamed frustration
This is where the recent frustration expressed privately by a senior retired military officer becomes relevant—though he need not be named. His anger is not merely about tone; it is about logic. If the breach implied by the film were genuinely possible, how could it occur without connivance or facilitation across multiple officials and layers? How could any single cabinet minister, or even a small clique, pull off such a feat without a wide ecosystem of enabling actions and deliberate blindness?
And the second question is equally sharp. If such a seismic breach did occur, how plausible is it that one lone super-agent alone knew, alone acted, and alone saved the day—while every other agency and professional ecosystem remained clueless or inept? In a complex state, large-scale breaches do not happen as solo acts. They happen through systems: captured nodes, compromised processes, deliberate delays, selective enforcement, and sustained looking away. That is why cinematic insinuations—when repackaged as historical claims—are not just misleading; they are intellectually dishonest.
The Telgi scam: the anatomy of a leakage
To see how “impossible” leakages become possible in real life, one may recall the Telgi stamp paper scam. Stamp paper underpins stamp duty and the legal validation of countless everyday transactions; yet counterfeit stamp paper circulated at scale for years across multiple states. The point is not the personality of one villain, but the structural lesson: scams of that magnitude endure only when networks, access, distribution channels—and some degree of protection or non-action—align. That is why sensational claims about breaches in sovereign systems should not be consumed as self-proving simply because they are theatrically convincing.
Why wholesale defamation of ‘officialdom’ is unfair
In real governance—especially in sensitive domains—big actions are rarely the whim of one individual acting alone. They run through files, authorisations, vetting layers, inter-departmental coordination, and formal and informal checks. That is not romantic faith in bureaucracy; it is simply how complex systems are structured.
Therefore, when a film’s narrative is used to smear “the entire officialdom” of a particular era as traitorous, the charge collapses under its own weight. Either the narrative is dramatic fiction (and should be treated as such), or it implies a conspiracy so widespread that it becomes extraordinary—and extraordinary claims require evidence, not cinematic inference.
The danger is not merely reputational. It corrodes institutional legitimacy. It tells young officers that their service will be judged not by record or law but by rumours and screenplays. It tells citizens that the state is either populated by villains or saved only by superheroes—both unhealthy ideas in a constitutional democracy.
Ajit Doval and the perils of superhero politics
One reason Dhurandhar has become politically combustible is that viewers read certain characters as being modelled—directly or in spirit—on real national security figures, with Ajit Doval most frequently mentioned in public chatter. It is appropriate, therefore, to address him plainly and respectfully.
Ajit Doval’s public reputation has not been built by cinema but by decades of hard, largely unglamorous professional work in the intelligence and security domain—work that is seldom fully visible to citizens and almost never reducible to a single headline. Even allowing for the necessary opacity of that world, few would dispute that he is widely regarded as a strategist with deep operational experience, a keen grasp of statecraft, and a temperament suited to high-stakes national security management. In other words, the credit he receives does not require theatrical amplification.
Precisely for that reason, it does neither him nor the country any good to convert his image into comic-book mythology—a lone “Bond” who alone understood everything while everyone else slept. National security is not the work of one man, however capable. It is the product of institutions: systems, teams, information flows, inter-agency coordination, legal and diplomatic constraints, and institutional memory—often with outcomes that remain classified for reasons of state.
Predictably, however, inveterate critics of the Modi administrations—1.0, 2.0 and 3.0—will seize the current moment to attempt to embarrass the government by weaponising the film’s insinuations. Their line will be seductive in its simplicity: “If any of this were remotely true, why did Doval keep quiet for so many years?” It is a question designed less to illuminate than to insinuate, and less to seek answers than to manufacture discomfort.
In the intelligence domain, the premise itself is flawed. Silence is frequently protocol, not confession. Intelligence professionals do not litigate operational matters in public merely because cinema has dramatised a version of them, and they do not validate—or invalidate—screen narratives on demand. Treating “not speaking” as “therefore true” is a logical fallacy, but a convenient one for those eager to convert fiction into revelation and entertainment into a political cudgel.
Disclaimers are civic hygiene, not censorship
The sensible reform here is not censorship, but clarity. If a film uses recognisable historical contours while altering facts for drama, it should carry unmistakable disclaimers—not blink-and-miss lines, but repeated signalling that characters are composites and events are dramatised.
This matters particularly in an age where scenes circulate as short clips stripped of context. The disclaimer must travel with the fragment, not remain buried in the original. Regulators and the censor apparatus—without becoming ideological gatekeepers—can reasonably insist on stronger, unmissable disclosures when a film is likely to be consumed as political “evidence”.
What citizens should do with Dhurandhar
Enjoy it as cinema if you wish. Praise performances, critique the politics, analyse the craft, debate the messaging. But do not treat it as a charge-sheet. Do not use it to defame unnamed civil servants who cannot rebut insinuations that brush against classified domains. Do not turn plot devices into dinner-table certainty.
Above all, avoid the temptation of superhero politics. Governments change; institutions remain. Leaders deserve respect, but they also deserve to be protected from the kind of myth-making that reduces governance to spectacle. Ajit Doval need not be turned into a cinematic saviour for his public service to be acknowledged; and the state need not be portrayed as uniformly villainous in earlier eras for present leadership to be valued.
Conclusion: patriotism deserves facts, not fabrication
A mature patriotism can enjoy spy fiction without confusing it for history. It can acknowledge strong leadership without converting it into mythology. And it can critique past governments—fairly—without smearing entire institutions on the strength of a screenplay.
Dhurandhar may be effective entertainment. But the republic is strengthened when citizens insist on the distinction between evidence and excitement—between documentation and dramatization. Films will always exaggerate; audiences will always speculate. Yet public discourse need not collapse into gullibility. The right response is steadier: watch, enjoy, critique—and before you accuse, ask for facts.
I respectfully disagree with the article’s central critique, because it misreads both the intent and the construction of the film.
First, there is no credible evidence of myth-making in the storytelling. The film does not elevate its protagonists into folklore or civilizational archetypes, it grounds them firmly within the constraints, frustrations, and moral ambiguity of statecraft.
Second, the narrative explicitly weaves verified historical events, the 2001 Parliament attack, 26/11, Kandahar, into a fictionalized intelligence framework. This is not distortion, it is a standard cinematic device used to explore causality, delay, and restraint without pretending to be a documentary.
Third, Pakistan’s involvement in terror attacks on India is not speculative mythology, it is well documented through dossiers, intercepted communications, international investigations, and court proceedings. Treating this as nationalist fantasy ignores decades of recorded evidence.
Fourth, the Kandahar episode is portrayed with factual sobriety. Jaswant Singh’s presence on the tarmac negotiating with the Taliban is historical record, not narrative invention. The film neither glorifies nor vilifies it, it presents it as a moment of strategic helplessness.
Fifth, references to internal sabotage, including counterfeit currency operations, are not fictional insinuations. The film points to a serving Indian minister aiding Pakistan in acquiring currency printing plates, a scale of betrayal that echoes real historical scandals. While the exact crime differs, figures such as Lalu Prasad Yadav were implicated in corruption and state-level collusion of comparable gravity during that period. The film avoids naming, choosing implication over accusation.
Sixth, the charge that the film turns Ajit Doval into a superhero does not hold. He is portrayed with restraint, emphasizing patience, institutional discipline, and timing over bravado, a portrayal closer to bureaucratic realism than cinematic exaggeration.
Seventh, the depiction of Uttar Pradesh’s past law and order failures is not cinematic license. The New York Times itself documented how SP-led administrations presided over slaughterhouse networks and cow mafia operations, many run by Muslim groups with deep political protection, contributing to organized crime and administrative paralysis. Acknowledging reform is not propaganda, it is temporal honesty.
Finally, if there is a legitimate critique to be made, it lies in a single moment of tonal excess, the recycled “new India” line, which feels unnecessary and derivative. That moment alone does not invalidate the film’s broader restraint or intent.
In short, while the article’s skepticism is presented with intellectual polish, it overcorrects, mistaking factual aggregation and narrative discipline for nationalist myth-building. The film does not ask the audience to suspend reason, it assumes the audience already knows the history and invites reflection on its long arc.
That, to me, is precisely its strength.
Officialdom follows the orders of Political leadership. In Indian administration, there is corruption and malpractices at all levels, those who deny it must have never opened their eyes. Cinema is most popular medium of entertainment in India and message conveyed by it, particularly, by a popular film stays with audiences for very long. Dhurandhar has done its job, it has told the "true scenarios based" story in an incredible way and audiences are largely convinced of that everything that was told in the story is true. Reason why people are convinced is not because the film has big stars, it is made on a large scale, has good music etc. The reason is because there are so many scams by the politicians, bribes paid by people almost for any govt service including in courts....people are aware of it. Plus people have seen Parliament attack, IC814 and 26/11 themselves.
Citing the checks and balances is of no use when we all know that a foreigner can live in Prime Minister's house for 13 years, a Prime Minister can take his foreigner friends/relatives on INS Virat to a prohibited location in Andaman, an ex-CM can be on bail on medical grounds forever and still do elections campaigning and SC turns blind eye, a foreigner can be listed as a voter if she is daughter in law of the PM, son in law of chairperson of NAC is notified not to be security screened at any airport, the list can go on. Not sure how politicians could do all this without the help of Babus.
The checks and balances are to satisfy the auditors, those who live in those checks and balances very well know how to manipulate the system at whatever scale. Fake currency was a reality, at least till 2015. Now, I am not sure because I stopped handling cash long ago.