By - Nirendra Dev
The key takeaway is about what has happened to the people watching it — and those writing about it.
I spoke to half-dozen journalists in their fifties about how their profession as they changed since 2014. Most are jobless. Some describe themselves as freelancers. One has retrained for AI work in Pune. Another runs a kachori stall in Vaishali.
The media ecosystem that would once have interrogated Dhurandhar 2’s politics with independent authority has been transformed — by economics, by consolidation, by the very Moditva phenomenon the film celebrates. The film shines.
The journalists who might have contextualised it are selling kachoris.
Honsla. Eendhan. Badla. Courage. Instigation. Revenge. That is how Sanyal describes the India-Pakistan story.
It may also be how the film’s makers describe their relationship with the audience.
Theatres Erupt as Modi appears on screen in ‘Dhurandhar 2
Rs 143 crore in two days, fake ISI notes burned during demonetisation, and Yogi’s UP framed as the honest alternative — how Aditya Dhar’s blockbuster doubles as a four-hour political reel.
The numbers are extraordinary. ‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ earned ₹43 crore nett from premiere shows alone on March 19, taking its two-day total to ₹143 crore nett — ahead of Kalki 2898 AD, Jr NTR’s Devara, and Rajinikanth’s Coolie at comparable stages. Adipurush managed ₹87 crore at launch. Coolie earned ₹65 crore. Dhurandhar 2 has lapped them both.
The film is a commercial phenomenon. The question is: a commercial phenomenon selling what, exactly?
The four-hour Aditya Dhar and Ranveer Singh collaboration contains two sequences featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi — his May 26, 2014 oath-taking ceremony, and his November 8, 2016 demonetisation address. According to India Today, “theatres erupt” each time Modi appears on screen. Clips of audience reactions have gone viral.
The demonetisation scene is where the political architecture of the film becomes impossible to ignore. As Modi announces demonetisation on screen, spy Hamza — alias Jaskirat Singh Rangi — sets fire to a warehouse full of fake old ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes. The ISI, the film alleges, had been flooding India with counterfeit currency to ensure the Samajwadi Party — not named explicitly but unmistakably implied — won the Uttar Pradesh state election. Demonetisation foils the plan. An “honest government under Yogi” follows.
The Telegraph, owned by the Ananda Bazar Patrika group, called it plainly: “Dhar makes no pretense of his intentions. He is not interested in telling the redemption story of a spy who sacrificed his normal life. The intent, from the word go, is to drive home the message that India — oops Bharat — has changed post 2014. And now, we enter into our enemies’ homes and wreck them from within.”
The film opens with a line that functions as its ideological provocation: “Hindu bahut hi darpok kaum hain” — Hindus are always very cowardly — delivered as a taunt from the enemy, setting up the entire revenge narrative. The response, built across four hours of runtime, is the film’s commercial and political product.
Dhar’s template is not new. In 2019, Uri: The Surgical Strike arrived in the weeks before a general election and delivered substantial box office dividends — along with what many analysts noted were substantial political ones for the BJP. In Uri, Paresh Rawal played a chess-master strategist modelled transparently on NSA Ajit Doval. In Dhurandhar, R. Madhavan plays spy chief Ajay Sanyal — different name, identical function, identical framing.
The spy apparatus of the Indian state is brilliant, moral, and decisive. Its political masters are legitimate and visionary. Its enemies are Pakistan, the ISI, and — by implication — whatever domestic political forces are shown to benefit from Pakistani interference.
The Moditva playbook, as Dev frames it, has a long lineage. When Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, Doordarshan’s Ramayana and Mahabharat turned religious sentiment “electronic opium.” The BJP, from its earliest phase, understood how to tap that reservoir.
Mann Ki Baat was radio as intimate political connection.
Uri was cinema as surgical strike on the opposition narrative.
Dhurandhar 2 is the same machine at greater scale and higher production value — four hours, ₹143 crore, and PM Modi on screen twice.
(Courtesy - The Raisina Hills)
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