The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl spent the decades after the German dictator Adolf Hitler’s death insisting that the documentaries she made at his behest were not propaganda and denying knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust. Her films were shot after Hitler had disseminated his lethal, fascist manifesto, yet her work – especially Triumph of the Will, with its lavish scale and camerawork – served to both lionise and normalise Hitler and his cohort. While Triumph of the Will, released in 1935, did not spell out its intent, it painted a picture of a glorious regime with a humongous, reverential flock, mirroring methods used more conspicuously by makers of men-centric fiction features to gigantify their protagonists.
The ingenious disguising of its objective by a director of undeniable talent made Triumph of the Will a landmark in propaganda cinema. When the Hindi film Dhurandhar was released in December 2025, it seemed that the writer and director Aditya Dhar aspired to a small measure of the plausible deniability that Riefenstahl had built into Triumph of the Will. While she used the pretence of her film being a straightforward documentary, Dhar employs the feature film format to disguise propaganda in service of the Hindu nationalist project that has swept and warped India in recent decades. What begins as a spy story ends as a paean to the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, as a justification of his government’s worst policies, and an endorsement of the divisive ideologies and tactics of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Dhar blurs the lines between matters of public record, recognisable public figures and pure fantasy, so that Dhurandhar has the deliberate appearance of fact masquerading as fiction. This allows its right-wing fans to tomtom the film as a true accounting of crimes against India and its Hindu majority, yet both Dhurandhar’s makers and admirers can scoff at critics of such hate-mongering cinema by calling it a work of fiction when the need arises.
Dhurandhar tells the story of a spy named Hamza Ali Mazari infiltrating the underworld in Lyari, a locality in Karachi, as part of an Indian operation to dismantle terror networks in Pakistan. Hamza is, as we learn at the end of the film, an alias for Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a Sikh from India who assumes a Muslim identity to go undercover. His first target is Rehman Baloch, also known as Rehman Dakait, a character based on and with the same name as a real-life Lyari ganglord. In the film, this man is instrumental in the real-life militant terror attack on Mumbai on 26 November 2008.
Dhurandhar centres Rehman. Its sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, released this March, focuses on Hamza as he embarks on a killing spree in Pakistan to avenge every high-profile attack on the Indian state in recent years – the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, the 2001 attack on India’s parliament, the 26/11 Mumbai attack and other atrocities engineered, or widely thought to be engineered, by forces in Pakistan.