It’s almost amusing how a section of Bollywood can’t resist clutching their pearls every time a film dares to celebrate India’s national security establishment. Shazia Iqbal, the filmmaker who made a mess out of Periyerum Perumal through her Dhadak 2, has now decided to label Dhurandhar a “sinister” film that “incites hate and violence.”
Her Instagram sermon (without naming the film) is the latest reminder of how easy it has become for the privileged “woke” club to equate patriotism with bigotry and national pride with propaganda.
For starters, Dhurandhar isn’t a film about hate, it’s a film about resolve. About the price India pays to defend its sovereignty against cross-border terrorism. When a movie portrays Indian spies dismantling terror outfits, it isn’t “inciting violence”; it’s reflecting the reality of what countless men and women in uniform face daily. But for filmmakers like Iqbal, who romanticize rebellion and victimhood, such portrayal is apparently too “sinister” to digest.
The same industry circles that cheered Raazi, Haider, or Mulk for their “nuance” suddenly brand Dhurandhar as hateful when the narrative doesn’t centre guilt on India. The hypocrisy couldn’t be starker.
Iqbal’s statement that the film has “inciting hate in its DNA” reveals more about her prejudices than about the movie. If showing terrorism for what it is, brutal, ideological, and anti-human, offends her, perhaps the problem lies in her empathy for the wrong side of the border. It’s not “sinister” to portray Pakistan’s role in cross-border attacks. It’s factual.
And for someone who complains of “blatant apathy towards minorities,” perhaps she should ask why her own Dhadak 2, despite all the online moral posturing, failed to connect with audiences who are frankly tired of being schooled on identity and caste related propaganda masked as cinema.
In addition to Dhurandhar, Shazia also took aim at the teaser of Vipul Shah’s upcoming film The Kerala Story 2, the sequel to his 2023 blockbuster. Her Instagram story that said, “And then there is Kerala Story 2 teaser,” – she shared this Instagram Story with the audio of AR Rahman’s iconic patriotic track “Ye Jo Des Hai Tera” from Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2004 coming-of-age classic Swades, starring Shah Rukh Khan. She also reposted a discussion highlighting how social media’s spread of misinformation and prejudice poses a grave threat in today’s world—one that she suggested could be a more dangerous form of propaganda than even Nazi Germany.
All this only reinforces how allergic the “independent filmmaker” ecosystem is to narratives that question radicalization or expose religious extremism. The default response is censorship by shaming, calling it “propaganda,” “hate,” or “dangerous.”
But audiences have moved beyond that filter. The record-breaking success of Dhurandhar, domestically and globally, proves that Indians want stories that respect their intelligence and their patriotism. They don’t see everything through the religion-caste binary that Bollywood’s elite cannot seem to move beyond.
Films like Dhurandhar resonate because they mirror the country’s spirit: proud, assertive, and unwilling to apologize for defending itself. The louder the “intolerance” cry from the woke class, the clearer it becomes that these stories are striking the right nerve.
In the end, Shazia Iqbal’s rant is about control. The gatekeepers of “liberal art” can’t stand the fact that audiences are rewarding unapologetically Indian narratives over ideological sermons.
So, if Dhurandhar seems “sinister” to that clique, maybe it’s because, for once, truth on screen isn’t bending to their script.
Source: Indian Express
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