The Mob Comes for Film Critics

Dhurandhar and the manufacture of a national consensus

- / SURABHI KANGA

If the goal is to serve nationalistic propaganda to the masses, there is hardly a better medium than a slickly produced, multi-starrer, action-packed spy thriller that straddles fact and fiction, and uses one to bolster the other. The cloak-and-dagger world of spies presents fertile ground for creating national heroes and national enemies. Also, when nationalism is the defining quality of a film, raising questions about it can be made to look like treason. Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar released in early December. The nature of online public discourse—if we must call it that—surrounding the film is familiar to anyone who has been on India's corner of the internet in the past decade. Where trolls earlier descended on academics, activists and journalists, today they have zeroed in on film critics.

Dhurandhar is set during the bloody 2000s in the gangster town of Lyari, a dense settlement in Pakistan's Karachi, which was then under the grip of warring Baloch and Pashtun crime lords. Ranveer Singh plays Hamza Ali Mazari, a gorilla-build Indian spy who infiltrates the gang of Rehman Baloch, played to great effect and virality by Akshaye Khanna—whose hairline and career appear to be making a comeback. Sanjay Dutt features as Baloch's rival and a rogue cop, and Arjun Rampal as the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. The Pakistani characters are especially prone to psychopathic violence. Though much of the film is focussed on gang rivalry and the tussle for political control over Lyari—which is said to hold the key to Karachi and, by extension, Pakistan—the gangs are also shown to be connected to crimes across the border, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks and a fake-currency network.