Recently released Indian movies Dhurandhar, Sky Force and Border 2 in the post-Pahalgam crisis have refreshed the political role of the Indian entertainment industry, laced with multileveled anti-Pakistan narratives. These three movies provide a glimpse of growing anti-Pakistani tendencies of the Indian, Mumbai-based film industry, Bollywood. It is one of the world’s largest entertainment industries and internationally recognised as the home of film, television, and modelling. The above-mentioned three recent productions of Bollywood movies tried to outline publicly the Indian updated false flag operations against Pakistan in the contemporary post-information age, where the verification of manipulated facts and exaggerated information portrayal in movies has become a vibrant trend.
The release of three movies, loaded with political propaganda, attempting to justify the Indian government's proclaimed positions on the four-day conflict of 2025 with Pakistan, while representing Pakistan as the primary source of causing regional instability, contributes to endangering the scope of peace and development in South Asia. The cinematic victory pictured in these movies attempts to channelise public anger in Indian society. It is fundamentally meant to support the Modi government’s contemporary anti-Pakistan obsession. The Modi government dramatically augmented its multilayered efforts for promoting a nationwide culture of socio-political antipathy towards the Muslim population living within India with the support of Indian cinema. In addition to targeting or marginalising the role of the Muslim community in the country's diverse social domains, Prime Minister Modi’s extremist ideological infiltrations in state politics have decided to use the entertainment industry as a prime source of shaping public opinion in specific directions.
It has transformed the traditional patterns of Indian movies from emotionally sensitive dialogues to politically-empowered scripts seeking to cultivate massive admiration
The Modi government's exclusive focus on the political role of Indian major entertainment platforms has made Bollywood an appropriate domain for popularising and commercialising the production of an ultra-nationalist ideological agenda laced with a wide range of fascinations. These fascinations have made the critical political contents in Indian movies commercially rewarding, publicly supportive, and politically logical while multiplying their worldwide audience. An astute combination of these perspectives has dramatically incentivised the Modi government's version of Indian patriotic sentiments, charged with a negative depiction of Pakistan’s ideology, society, culture, politics, economy, and diplomatic alignments of Islamabad’s mainstream foreign relations with the outside world. It has made the India-Pakistan conflict one of the leading concentrations of the Indian film industry, where debates on Pakistan-centric sensitive topics have prevailed at the box office.
In addition to an intense engagement of Bollywood’s production houses in manufacturing specific antagonistic and imprecise public narratives, the involvement of selected showbiz celebrities in the movies carrying political agendas has activated the role of Bollywood’s renowned superstars in Modi-led Pakistan-specific Indian disinformation operations. In this way, the symbolic patriotic performances in the recently released movies provide the actors with high ratings, viral circulations, and dramatically increasing visibility among the general public. It has transformed the traditional patterns of Indian movies from emotionally sensitive dialogues to politically-empowered scripts seeking to cultivate massive admiration among the general public and government’s selective policymaking circles.
This scenario has changed the actual role of Bollywood as an Indian film industry capable of providing a unique translation of universal human experiences, evolving public emotions, and unfamiliar cultural traits of the subcontinent into a cinematic communication. The intervention of specific political agendas in Bollywood's philosophy of storytelling and entertainment has altered its fundamental characteristics. In the modern history of the Indian film industry, these exceptional characteristics were based on Indian Masala movies offering a mixture of various entertaining elements to their audiences. A wide range of Masala movie productions in Bollywood internationally tagged India as a Masala Galaxy, presenting a unique blend of action, comedy, romance, music, and melodrama in its major productions. Its transformation into political productions has started following a specific propaganda defaming Pakistan’s soft image and diplomatic standings in the regional and extra-regional affairs.
Thus, the recently released movies have shown that the Indian film industry is strictly aligned with justifying the strategic orientations of New Delhi’s contemporary standings in the regional and global security landscapes. Furthermore, the transformation from emotional and social issues to different political themes showed that the Indian film industry has adequately configured with the government's incoming policies regarding its prevailing disagreements with the territorially adjoining nations. It has made the Indian cinema a popular means of launching various political campaigns, which sometimes criticise the contesting political narratives of Indian domestic politics, and their main functioning against the ruling governments.
Based on these descriptions, Bollywood, originating from a combination of Bombay (now Mumbai) and Hollywood, has become a leading entertainment industry of India with a massive strength of worldwide fan-following. Its major production houses have cultivated high strengths of its dedicated admirers, enthusiastic supporters, and advocating debaters from around the world through providing fascinating content equipped with different interesting features. Thus, the arrival of Modi’s ideology-driven extremist political agenda in Indian politics and New Delhi’s witnessing the undesired results of the four-day kinetic armed clash with Pakistan emerged as the leading factors transforming the role of Bollywood in Indian society. It has been proven that the Indian film industry can no longer be treated as a neutral entertainment platform but as the government’s preferred narrative-building institution. The repeated attempts of stigmatising Pakistan's national image in the movies based on the selective and manipulated narrations of the subcontinent's conflicted history, and its inseparable connections with the contemporary South Asian crisis, play a significant role in this regard. In this way, the prevalence of this political pattern of involving entertainment industries in the decades-long interstate conflict of two territorially adjoining nuclear nations further undermines the scope of peace, stability, and development in South Asia.
This situation undermines the greater visions of regional soft power projections and the probabilities of increasing societal connections between India and Pakistan. It further forces the Pakistani film industry to plan reciprocal actions through designing several counterbalancing measures while departing from its ongoing restraints from taking analogous steps. It demands Pakistan's policymaking circles to chalk out a plan for making soft-power retaliation possible without calculating its impacts on the broader scope of regional peace and stability. Therefore, a pragmatic approach comprising rational calculations of mutual moves departing from the conventional hostile inflexibilities is required in the India-Pakistan conflict, where Indian generally remained a trend-setter. So, the New Delhi-based leadership is required to spare its film industry from the hostile propagation of regional security issues, which could emerge in future as a leading tool of breaking traditional stereotyping of South Asian hostile culture.