By Vipul Tamhane
How a Bollywood blockbuster and a diplomatic safe passage reveal the same truth about a nation finding its voice.
There is a scene playing out simultaneously in two very different theaters (pun intended), and almost nobody has connected them. The audience returning to watch 'Dhurandhar - The Revenge' in the Indian multiplexes for their second and third viewings because its political content led critics to declare it BJP propaganda, while its supporters saw it as a civilizational assessment. The other theatre shows the Iranian government’s allowance of Indian vessels to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, while the country maintains restrictions against US and European vessels.
The combination of these two stories demonstrates a larger narrative that extends beyond the individual facts. The Indian soft power movement shows its presence on the global stage by demonstrating its capacity to achieve success through its own methods.
The term "Indian soft power" in the last 50 years became associated with Bollywood song-and-dance diplomacy through movements that included a Shah Rukh Khan film playing in Cairo and a yoga retreat in California, and the Nehru-era belief that India would establish its international reputation through its cultural heritage.
The period showed a specific aesthetic which combined hospitality with syncretism while maintaining a non-threatening manner. The film 'Pathaan' served as the cinematic representation of that time through its portrayal of an India-Pakistan spy thriller, which maintained an uncertain Muslim identity for its protagonist and showed an American character as the antagonist, while the movie removed all patriotic elements from its story.
Both liberals and nationalists could watch it comfortably. Nobody had to choose. 'Dhurandhar 2' obliterates that comfort entirely. Aditya Dhar's film names Pakistan as the adversary without irony, celebrates the post-2014 national security state with unmistakable affection, and frames the conflict in explicitly cross-border ideologist terms.
Mainstream critics in major publications have reached for words like "Islamophobic" and "propaganda". The critics avoid asking this question because it makes them uncomfortable about determining who the propaganda benefits and what goals it seeks to achieve.
All James Bond movies served as propaganda, which supported Western liberal democracy, the special relationship, and the belief that Britain maintained its global importance. Every CIA plot, every Tom Clancy adaptation was propaganda for American primacy. Nobody apologized. The West called it soft power, and the world watched.
What 'Dhurandhar' signals is that India has decided to stop apologizing for its own narrative, which is not unknown. The film has generated as much conversation in Pakistan as in India, spawning memes that cross the border digital walls nightly. That is soft power functioning exactly as it should: generating conversation, asserting presence, forcing engagement.
The nationalist can celebrate; the liberal can protest; Pakistan cannot ignore it, and can’t help watching the pirated copies for fact-check, validation and resonance. In the new competitive theatre of cultural influence, invisibility is the only true defeat.
The Hormuz passage makes the same argument from geopolitics. When Iran chose to accommodate Indian shipping through one of the world's most contested waterways, while conflict raged and American vessels were fair game, it was not doing India a favor out of sentiment.
The recognition of India as a valuable country which Western powers should not antagonise exists because India has maintained its status as a regular purchaser of Iranian oil during sanction periods, while it served as a partner for the Afghan corridor and it maintained diplomatic relations with Iran during the entire period from the Iranian revolution to the Cold War and nuclear standoffs and the Iranian oil import ban which India implemented because of American pressure.
Indian foreign policy has maintained its fundamental rule since the time of Nehru, which enables the relationship between India and Israel to endure through all changes in international relations.
The present situation in India represents an exceptional historical moment because the film and the passage should be understood together as one geopolitical statement.
India is implementing multiple strategies, which include protecting itself against American tariff pressure while completing a major free trade agreement with the European Union, and reopening economic relations with China, while keeping its military presence on the Himalayan border and strengthening its Gulf partnerships, and maintaining its ties with Iran.
The approach does not constitute non-alignment. It is multi-alignment, a more demanding posture that requires a country to be genuinely valuable to multiple competing powers rather than simply absent from their quarrels.
Absence was Nehru's gift. Presence is Modi's wager. The international imperative here is clear. In a world fracturing into blocs, where the United States has made transactionalism its official foreign policy, where China offers investment with strings, and where Europe searches for strategic autonomy it cannot quite afford, India's model of principled pragmatism is not just useful for India. It is useful for the architecture of a multipolar world that doesn't collapse into two hostile camps.
India's ability to hold the Hormuz passage while releasing a film that Pakistan cannot stop watching, to sign an EU trade deal while managing Chinese economic overtures, to remain Washington's partner without becoming Washington's client, this combination offers smaller and middle powers a template.
The critics of 'Dhurandhar' are not entirely wrong. Its portrayal of religion is blunt to the point of discomfort. The filmmaker himself may have chosen different tools had he wanted to light a subtler fire. But the larger argument the film is making, that India is done performing strategic amnesia about where its threats come from, is one that the Hormuz passage validates from the other direction. Iran trusts India precisely because India has never pretended its interests away.
The passage through Hormuz was earned across seven decades. The confidence on screen has been building for at least one. Soft power, at its most effective, is not a charm. It is credibility. India is learning, loudly and with some mess, that credibility requires the courage to be seen.
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(Vipul Tamhane is a counter-terrorism expert and governance consultant)
The views expressed are not necessarily those of The South Asian Times
