The Longest Campaign

This is a long piece, not Dhurandhar-level long. If you watched Dhurandhar for seven hours, you can spare twenty minutes for this. By the end, you might understand why you watched Dhurandhar for seven hours.

Seven hours. That is how long Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar duology runs. Seven hours across two films, released three months apart, watched by tens of millions of Indians in theatres, generating over Rs 2,350 crore at the box office and counting. The duology has been called many things. Propaganda. Myth-making. A masterpiece. A disgrace. IGN said it walks “a fine line between raucous entertainment and hateful propaganda.” Mint called it “propaganda in service of a hawkish India, designed to flatter the ruling BJP leadership.” Anurag Kashyap compared it to Zero Dark Thirty. A Times of India essay coined the term “Dhurandhar Derangement Syndrome” and argued that Bollywood has finally learned “the art of myth-making, à la Top Gun or American Sniper.”

Everyone is debating whether Dhurandhar is propaganda. Nobody is asking the more interesting question: why does a seven-hour film about an Indian spy in Karachi, released in the same week that Pakistan was publicly credited as the mediator in the Iran peace process, generate more emotional response, more cultural conversation, and more political energy than any speech, manifesto, editorial, or news broadcast in India this year?

The answer is that cinema is the most powerful political communication tool ever invented. It predates television. It outlasts election cycles. It operates at a level of emotional penetration that no manifesto, no rally, no social media post can match. A voter forgets a campaign promise within a week. She remembers a film dialogue for a lifetime.

Every serious power in the world has understood this. What nobody has mapped is that there are four distinct models of how cinema and political power interact. And India is the only country in the world that has practised all four.

The first model: the state builds a cinema. This is the American model. Hollywood as the soft power arm of the Pentagon and the CIA.

The second model: freedom builds a cinema. This is what Indian filmmakers did under British rule, encoding resistance into mythology and allegory, and what Nehru’s India did after independence, building the idea of a new republic through the stories it told on screen.

The third model: the cinema builds politicians. This is what happened in South India, where actors became Chief Ministers, fan clubs became party cadres, and the line between the screen hero and the political leader was erased by design.

The fourth model: the ideology builds a cinema. This is what is happening right now. In this model, nobody commissions propaganda. The political ecosystem creates an audience, and the audience creates a market, and the market creates the films. The government did not commission Dhurandhar. It did not need to. The audience was ready. The market existed before the film did.

This long read is about the longest campaign in the history of political communication. It is about the reel and the Republic. And it begins not in India, but in a CIA office in Washington.

Animal Farm

In the early 1950s, the CIA secretly purchased the film rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The agency hired a British animation studio, Halas and Batchelor, to produce the adaptation. They did not use an American studio because, as Cold War historian Tony Shaw documented, “they wanted some distance. Using a British company made it look less like American propaganda.” The CIA then rewrote the ending. In Orwell’s novel, the pigs who represent communist masters become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. In the CIA’s version, the animals revolt and overthrow the pigs. “This was intended by the CIA to act as some sort of symbol or inspiration for revolution” among people living under communism, Shaw wrote. The filmmakers did not know they were working for the CIA.

This was not an isolated operation. It was the beginning of a century-long collaboration between the American state and the American entertainment industry that continues to this day. The Pentagon’s Entertainment Liaison Office has provided cooperation, including access to military bases, equipment, and personnel, to over 800 films in exchange for script review and approval. The mechanism is simple: if you want to film on an aircraft carrier or use real fighter jets, the Department of Defence will help. In return, it gets to review your script. The result is not crude propaganda. It is something far more effective: a permanent, commercially viable, audience-funded narrative infrastructure that makes the American military look heroic, competent, and necessary.

The numbers tell the story. Top Gun, released in 1986 with full Navy cooperation, produced a documented surge in US Navy recruitment. The Navy set up recruiting booths in the theatre lobbies. Zero Dark Thirty, which depicted the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was made with CIA cooperation and access. The filmmaker met with CIA officials during production. Homeland, Iron Man, Transformers, The Recruit, all received Pentagon or CIA input. As one media scholar observed, “No country in the world churns out as many images of itself as the military hero as the United States does. That is a unique cultural phenomenon.”

The genius of the Hollywood model is that the audience never knows it is being persuaded. Joseph Nye, the political scientist who coined the term “soft power,” put it precisely: “The best propaganda is not propaganda.” The world believes America wins wars partly because Hollywood portrays it as doing so. Vietnam was a catastrophic military defeat. Hollywood turned it into a narrative of individual heroism, moral complexity, and eventual redemption. Iraq produced Abu Ghraib. Hollywood produced American Sniper. Afghanistan ended in a chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport. Hollywood will produce the version where brave soldiers did their best against impossible odds. The pattern is consistent: reality happens first; cinema rewrites it second; the rewritten version becomes the memory.

Britain understood this, too, though it played a different game. James Bond did more for Britain’s post-imperial global image than any diplomatic initiative. A country that lost an empire found a film franchise. Bond is British competence, British style, British moral authority, projected globally for six decades through a character who is, functionally, a government employee. The British state did not fund Bond. It did not need to. The franchise self-funds because the myth is commercially viable. That is the hallmark of effective narrative infrastructure: it pays for itself.

The American model requires institutional involvement: funding, access, script review, and decades of relationship-building. It is expensive and deliberate. But it is devastatingly effective because the product does not look like propaganda. It looks like entertainment. And entertainment, unlike news, is consumed voluntarily, repeatedly, and with emotional engagement that no editorial or briefing can replicate.

Keep this model in mind. We will return to it when we reach India’s present.

Mother India

India understood cinema as political communication before any Western government formalised the idea. Indian filmmakers were encoding political resistance into popular entertainment while the CIA was still learning to spell “propaganda.”

It started with an act of cultural defiance. In 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke released Raja Harishchandra, the first full-length Indian feature film. It was not explicitly political. But the act of making an Indian film, telling an Indian mythological story, in an Indian language, for an Indian audience, under colonial rule, was itself a political statement. The British controlled the government, the courts, the military, the railways, and the telegraph. They did not yet control the screen. Phalke claimed it before they could.

Within two decades, the screen had become a battlefield. In 1931, V. Shantaram made Swarajyache Toran, a Marathi film about Shivaji’s military campaigns. The title included the word “Swaraj.” The poster depicted Shivaji hoisting a saffron flag. The British censors understood exactly what this was. They forced a rename to Udaykal. They demanded the removal of the flag-hoisting climax. The censors grasped, before the filmmakers would publicly admit it, that cinema was a weapon.

A decade later, Sohrab Modi released Sikandar in 1941. Ostensibly a film about Alexander the Great’s defeat, it featured the song “Jeete Desh Humara, Bharat Hai Ghar Baar Humara.” On the surface, a prayer for victory against a Greek invader. In the theatres, audiences understood exactly who the “victory” was to be wrested from. The British censors did not catch the subtext. The audience did. This is the mechanism that Indian cinema perfected and that no other country’s resistance movement replicated at scale: the use of historical and mythological allegory to encode political messages that censors could not catch but audiences could decode. Shivaji was never just Shivaji. Krishna was never just Krishna. Alexander was never just Alexander. The audience was trained, over decades, to read the political subtext of on-screen mythology. That literacy in political subtext through cinema is a uniquely Indian cultural capability. It persists today.

By 1943, the encoding had become explicit. Kismet featured the song “Door hato ae duniyawalo, Hindustan hamara hai.” A film song did what a hundred political speeches could not: it gave the freedom movement a melody that every household could sing. As one historian noted, “Their reach extended to every household, much more than any other platform, even political mobilisation.”

The most consequential act of political communication in Indian history may not have been a speech or a proclamation but a novel. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anand Math, published in 1882, contained a poem called “Vande Mataram.” The song, which imagines India as a mother goddess to be worshipped and liberated, became the anthem of the Swadeshi movement in 1905 and the rallying cry of the independence struggle for four decades thereafter. The British banned its public singing. Revolutionaries went to the gallows with it on their lips. When Hemen Gupta adapted the novel into a film in 1952, with Lata Mangeshkar lending “Vande Mataram” its definitive voice, the song completed a seventy-year journey from the printed page to the cinema screen to the national consciousness. A novelist wrote it. A movement adopted it. Cinema immortalised it. That is the pipeline: literature to politics to screen to permanent memory. No other country has a national song that travelled this exact route.

When independence came in 1947, the new Republic needed a new story. Jawaharlal Nehru understood this, perhaps instinctively. He actively leveraged film stars, among them Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Prithviraj Kapoor, and Mohammad Rafi, to spread the dreams and goals of a free India. In a country where literacy was barely 18 per cent, cinema was the only mass communication technology that worked. The state inherited the British colonial film apparatus, the Films Division, and repurposed it for nation-building: documentaries explaining new institutions, Five-Year Plans, and democratic processes to a largely illiterate population. The new government understood what the colonial government had understood: whoever controls the screen controls the story.

But the real work was done not by the state but by filmmakers who internalised the Nehruvian vision and made it their own. Raj Kapoor is the quintessential Nehruvian filmmaker. His 1951 film Awaara, written by the Marxist sympathiser Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, questioned whether heredity or environment determines destiny. Socialist subtext encoded in a love story. The film became a sensation in the Soviet Union, China, and the Middle East. Raj Kapoor was mobbed on the streets of Moscow. India’s first global soft-power breakthrough came through Nehruvian socialism, delivered via a Bombay love story, not through state planning. Mother India, in 1957, India’s first Oscar-nominated film, built the foundational myth of the new Republic: the suffering mother as India, the sacrificing woman as the Republic, the wayward son as the temptation of corruption. Mehboob Khan built the national myth through a film, not a speech.

Yash Chopra’s Dhool Ka Phool in 1959 gave India its secular sermon in the form of a song: “Tu Hindu Banega Na Musalmaan Banega, Insaan Ki Aulad Hai, Insaan Banega.” A Muslim man raises a Hindu child. Not a government circular. Not a constitutional lecture. A song.

Indian cinema in the 1950s was the “cinema of the oppressed” across the developing world. Between 1945 and 1965, Indian films reached Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. In Greece, Mother India was screened for ten years. Working-class audiences across the Non-Aligned world identified with the poverty, the resilience, and the defiance of Western cultural dominance in Indian films. Bollywood did for the Non-Aligned Movement what RT is trying to do for Russia today, except it did it through love stories, not news bulletins. And it did it without a single rupee of state subsidy for global distribution.

Yet even in the golden age, Indian cinema was sophisticated enough to contain both the state’s story and its critique simultaneously. Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa in 1957, “Jinhe naaz hai Hind par vo kahan hai” (Where are those who are proud of India?), constituted the first cinematic counter-narrative to post-independence optimism. The Republic was barely a decade old, and its cinema already carried both the dream and the disillusionment. No propaganda apparatus in the world has ever achieved this: the simultaneous production of a national myth and its critique, within the same cultural industry, consumed by the same audience.

Deewar

The Nehruvian dream curdled in the 1970s. The economy stagnated. Corruption metastasised. Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency. And cinema did not just reflect the change. It created the emotional vocabulary for it.

Amitabh Bachchan’s “angry young man” films, Zanjeer in 1973, Deewar in 1975, and Sholay in 1975, embodied the rage of a generation that had been promised socialism and delivered corruption. The hero was no longer the Nehruvian idealist. He was the street-level vigilante who took justice into his own hands because the system had failed. The timing is critical. The most popular films of the Emergency era were about a man fighting a corrupt system. The audience consumed its political rage through cinema because every other channel of expression had been shut down. Parliament was suspended. The press was censored. Political opponents were jailed. But the cinema halls stayed open. And the man on screen was doing what the citizen could not: fighting back.

The structural shift from the 1950s to the 1970s is revealing. Nehruvian films had the subtext of inequality but stopped short of overt political angst. Emergency-era films made the angst explicit. The hero no longer believed in the system. He believed only in himself. This is Indira’s India on screen: populist, suspicious of institutions, reliant on the strongman. That emotional infrastructure, the admiration for the individual who cuts through a failed system, is still operative in 2026. The current government’s communication style, the strongman who acts where institutions fail, draws from the same well that Bachchan dug in 1975.

Indira Gandhi’s government understood what was happening. And it did what governments do when cinema becomes dangerous: it banned films. Kissa Kursi Ka, Amrit Nahata’s 1977 satire of the Emergency, was not merely censored. All prints were reportedly destroyed. It was the most extreme act of film censorship in Indian history: not editing a scene but destroying the film itself. Gulzar’s Aandhi, released in 1975, featured a woman politician who resembled Indira Gandhi. It was banned during the Emergency and re-released only after the Janata government came to power.

The censorship is the proof. If cinema were not powerful, governments would not ban it. The British banned Swaraj from film titles in 1931. Indira destroyed prints in 1977. The impulse is the same across half a century: the state reaches for the reel because it knows the reel shapes reality more durably than any gazette notification.

This impulse has not disappeared. In January 2026, the film Ikkis, which originally featured a nuanced portrayal of a compassionate Pakistani Brigadier, had a hostile disclaimer quietly added after its release, one that bore no relationship to the film’s narrative but aligned precisely with the government’s diplomatic messaging. The mechanism has evolved from destroying prints to inserting disclaimers, but the instinct remains the same: the state knows cinema matters, and it intervenes accordingly.

Parasakthi

No democracy in the world has seen cinema produce political leaders as systematically as India’s south. Tamil Nadu has not had a Chief Minister unconnected to cinema in six decades. This is not an accident. It is a communication architecture, and its blueprint can be traced to a single film.

In 1952, a young screenwriter named M. Karunanidhi wrote Parasakthi, a film that attacked caste oppression, religious hypocrisy, and social inequality through the story of three brothers separated by fate. The Madras censor board initially banned the film. When it was eventually released, it electrified Tamil Nadu. The dialogues became political slogans. The film did not just reflect the Dravidian movement. It became the Dravidian movement’s communication infrastructure. Karunanidhi went on to serve five terms as Chief Minister. He never stopped being a screenwriter. His political speeches had the rhythm of film dialogues, his campaign rhetoric had the dramatic arc of a screenplay, because for him, the two were never separate crafts.

C.N. Annadurai, the founder of the DMK, was also a screenwriter. In Tamil Nadu, the party was born from the screen, not the other way around. The Dravidian movement used cinema the way other political movements used pamphlets or newspapers: as the primary medium through which ideology reached the masses.

M.G. Ramachandran, known universally as MGR, perfected the system. As an actor, he was specific and deliberate in his method. Between 1972 and 1977, his films Netru Indru Naalai, Idhayakani, and Indru Pol Endrum Vazhga were explicit party propaganda vehicles. His characters fought corruption, championed the poor, and wore party symbols on screen. He campaigned using dialogue from his films. He refused to play villains because the audience could not separate the actor from the character. That was not a limitation. It was the design.

The mechanism has a specific social architecture. Fan clubs, which in Tamil Nadu number in the thousands for major stars, functioned as the organisational infrastructure of political parties. A fan club president in a district was, effectively, a party organiser. Fan club meetings were political mobilisation events. Film release days were demonstrations of strength. The box office was the opinion poll. When MGR’s fans filled theatres for a new release, they were simultaneously demonstrating the electoral base of his party. The system was self-reinforcing: popularity on screen generated political power, political power generated more prominent screen roles, and the cycle fed itself.

MGR served as Chief Minister for three terms until he died in office in 1987. His protégé and screen partner, Jayalalithaa, translated her on-screen persona as a powerful, self-made woman into the political identity of “Amma.” She served six terms as Chief Minister. The transition from cinema to politics was seamless because the character and the candidate were the same person. Her political rallies had the staging of film premieres. Her governance style had the drama of a screenplay. Even her funeral drew crowds that rivalled the largest film events in Indian history.

In Andhra Pradesh, N.T. Rama Rao played Hindu gods on screen, especially Krishna and Rama. He leveraged the divine association to found the Telugu Desam Party and overthrew Congress within a single year of entering politics. The mechanism was distinct from Tamil Nadu’s. In Tamil Nadu, cinema encoded ideology, specifically Dravidian rationalism and social justice. In Andhra Pradesh, cinema encoded divinity. NTR’s fans did not just admire a politician. They worshipped an actor who had been, on screen, literally God. The political party was an afterthought. The emotional infrastructure had been built on screen over decades of mythological films.

The caste dimension is critical and often overlooked. As the scholar S.V. Srinivas has documented, fan clubs in South India are organised along caste lines. When NTR, who belongs to the Kamma caste, entered politics, his fan base automatically delivered the Kamma vote. When Chiranjeevi, a Kapu, launched his party, the Kapu community followed. The cinema-to-politics pipeline is not just about fame. It is about caste mobilisation through fandom. The star’s caste identity, amplified through decades of on-screen heroism, becomes the organising principle of a political movement.

This is India’s unique contribution to the global cinema-politics nexus. It is India’s equivalent of the CIA-Hollywood relationship, but organic, bottom-up, and far more effective. The CIA had to fund Animal Farm secretly. MGR just made a film.

Today, Vijay is testing this model with his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam in the 2026 Tamil Nadu elections. He has confirmed he will contest solo, rejecting the NDA’s reported offer of 90 seats. His party has released a 462-page manifesto with 49 promises, including five state capitals, Tamil-medium medical education, and 50 per cent women candidates. The question hanging over Tamil Nadu is whether the MGR pipeline, from actor to fan club to political party to Chief Minister’s chair, survives in the age of social media. When every voter has a smartphone and every political claim can be fact-checked in real time, does the actor-to-politician mechanism still work? Or has the medium shifted while the mechanism remains the same? The answer will arrive on 4 May 2026, when Tamil Nadu counts its votes.

How’s the Josh?

Something structurally new is happening. A fourth model of cinema-politics interaction has emerged in India, one that has no precedent anywhere in the world. In this model, neither the state builds the cinema nor the cinema builds the politician. Instead, the political ecosystem builds the market, and the market builds the cinema. The ideology has become commercially self-sustaining.

The turning point was Uri: The Surgical Strike. Released in January 2019, Aditya Dhar’s debut was made in the aftermath of India’s cross-border strikes against Pakistan. It grossed Rs 342 crore on a modest budget. More significantly, it gave the BJP its most effective campaign slogan of the 2019 general election: “How’s the josh?” Prime Minister Modi used the line at rallies. Party workers printed it on banners. A film dialogue became a political war cry. The line between cinema and campaign did not blur. It collapsed. Not because the BJP commissioned the film, but because the film and the campaign were drawing from the same emotional reservoir.

The Kashmir Files, Vivek Agnihotri’s 2022 film about the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, proved the model was scalable. Made for approximately Rs 15 crore, it grossed Rs 340 crore. No Pentagon-style cooperation. No CIA-style covert funding. The film succeeded because a decade of narrative around Article 370, the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, and Hindu grievance had pre-prepared the audience. The market existed before the film did. The Prime Minister publicly praised it. Several BJP-governed states declared it tax-free. But the film did not need the endorsement to succeed. The audience was already there, waiting for the story it had been told to want.

And now, Dhurandhar. The duology has grossed over Rs 2,350 crore worldwide and is still running. It is the most commercially successful Hindi-language film franchise in history. Part One follows an Indian spy infiltrating Karachi’s criminal networks. Part Two depicts demonetisation as a masterstroke against terror financing and the ISI as having funded Indian elections. The films use real event names, real attack dates, real intelligence terminology, and real news footage, then fill the gaps with wish-fulfilment. Critics have noted that it is impossible to distinguish where the archive ends and the fantasy begins. That is the design. Aditya Dhar, a Kashmiri Pandit who directed Uri, is now the only director besides S.S. Rajamouli to have two Rs 1,000-crore films. He has built a career on the fourth model.

Both parts of Dhurandhar have been banned across the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. And on 26 March 2026, Dhar issued a statement warning about AI-manipulated images from the film circulating online. The film is now generating its own misinformation ecosystem. Content produces derivative content, which produces further derivative content, which feeds back into the original narrative. This is not a film. It is a self-sustaining information architecture.

The pipeline is accelerating. The same week that Dhurandhar: The Revenge opened, Vivek Agnihotri announced Operation Sindoor, a film he describes as “a revelation” that will expose “Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.” The announcement arrived on the same news cycle in which Pakistan was publicly credited as the mediator in the Iran peace process. The timing is the ecosystem responding to a perceived threat. When reality contradicts the narrative, cinema’s immune response is to produce a film that rewrites reality. I explored what actually happened during Operation Sindoor in an earlier piece on this blog, “The First War India Fought Twice,” in which I documented how the Indian media’s disinformation during the crisis destroyed India’s credibility at the exact moment it mattered most. The Reuters Institute at Oxford called it “a significant and troubling shift.” Now Agnihotri will produce the version where India’s credibility was not destroyed. That version will be watched by more people than those who have ever read the Reuters Institute report.

Meanwhile, Maatrubhumi, formerly titled Battle of Galwan, features Salman Khan as a colonel battling Chinese forces in the 2020 Ladakh clash. It includes aerial combat sequences in which Indian pilots shoot down Chinese aircraft, aircraft that, in the documented reality of the May 2025 conflict, were operated by Pakistan. The inversion is complete. Cinema rewrites military outcomes as victories. The audience, pre-prepared by a decade of narrative infrastructure, finds the rewritten version more emotionally satisfying than the documented reality.

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR reframed a tribal resistance story through a lens that both international and domestic audiences consumed, but for entirely different reasons. International audiences saw spectacle. Domestic audiences saw ideology. The film won an Oscar for a song while BJP politicians claimed its historical characters as Hindu heroes. A single film served two completely different political functions in two completely different markets simultaneously. That is a level of sophistication that the CIA, for all its decades of effort, never achieved with a single product.

Here is the structural difference from all previous models. Nobody is commissioning these films. There is no Ministry of Propaganda. There is no CIA equivalent. There is no MGR who is simultaneously the actor and the party leader. Instead, the political environment has become so pervasive that the film industry has aligned with it voluntarily, because voluntarily doing so is commercially profitable. The ideology has become a market. The market has become self-sustaining. This is more powerful than anything the CIA ever built because the filmmakers genuinely believe they are exercising creative freedom rather than following orders. And they may be right. The genius of the fourth model is that the question of whether it is propaganda or art is unanswerable, because it is both, simultaneously. The product’s commercial viability renders the distinction irrelevant.

Not every Indian filmmaker has joined this alignment. Independent voices persist, and some of the most critically acclaimed Indian cinema of the last decade has pushed against the prevailing current. But they are swimming upstream in a market that has found its most profitable current.

The feedback loop is clear. Films create audiences. Audiences create markets. Markets create more films. When a Times of India essayist writes that “Bollywood has finally learned the art of myth-making,” the observation is correct. What it does not observe is that this is a fourth model of cinema-politics interaction that nobody else in the world has built. It is more durable than Hollywood’s state-assisted machine because it does not need state assistance. It is more scalable than South India’s actor-politician pipeline because it does not require actors to enter politics. It is more effective than any government propaganda because the audience chooses to consume it, pays for the privilege, and defends it as entertainment.

If I were advising a government today, I would tell them: forget building a media channel. Build a political environment so pervasive that the film industry aligns with it voluntarily. A news channel reaches millions for a day. A film reaches hundreds of millions for a generation.

Parasite

While India’s cinema reshapes its domestic political landscape with extraordinary power, other countries are doing something India has not even considered: turning their cinema outward.

South Korea is the clearest example. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, President Kim Dae-Jung implemented the Hallyu Industry Support Development Plan, increasing government spending on culture from $14 million in 1998 to $84 million by 2001. In 2023, South Korea allocated $622.5 million to support cultural exports. The returns have been extraordinary. South Korea’s cultural exports exceeded $13.1 billion in 2023. Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars. Squid Game became the most-watched Netflix series in history. BTS spoke at the United Nations. K-pop groups are deliberately deployed as cultural ambassadors in bilateral diplomatic meetings. The Korean government’s 1999 Basic Law for Promoting Cultural Industries is the legislative equivalent of building a global media service, except that it operates through pop culture rather than news channels. South Korea went from a country whose GDP per capita was less than Ghana’s in 1965 to the world’s 12th-largest economy. Hallyu is a measurable contributor.

The Korean model is instructive because it was a deliberate policy choice made during a crisis. The government did not stumble into cultural exports. It decided, during the worst economic crisis in its modern history, that culture was a strategic asset worth investing in. It passed legislation. It created institutions like KOCCA, the Korea Creative Content Agency. It funded the infrastructure. And it lets the industry create the content. The state built the launchpad. The rockets were built by the private sector.

Japan built a parallel architecture through anime and manga: cultural exports worth an estimated $19.4 billion in 2023. The “Cool Japan” strategy, launched in 2010, explicitly frames anime, food, and fashion as soft power tools. The world knows Japan through its cultural products more than through its diplomacy. A country that lost the Second World War comprehensively has, through seventy years of cultural production, reshaped its global image from militarist aggressor to creative powerhouse. That is what cultural strategy looks like when it is executed over generations.

Turkey understood the mechanism for the Muslim world specifically. Turkish television dramas like Diriliş: Ertuğrul and Payitaht: Abdülhamid are watched across the Islamic world and have become tools of Neo-Ottoman soft power. Erdoğan personally promoted Ertuğrul. Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Imran Khan recommended it to his nation. The dramas rewrite Ottoman history as a source of Islamic pride. A television series did more for Turkey’s geopolitical positioning in the Muslim world than any diplomatic initiative.

China has been building its own version, though clumsily. The Wolf Warrior franchise and The Battle at Lake Changjin have generated enormous domestic box office returns. But the international reception has been poor because, as one analyst observed, “the audience is always the bosses in Beijing, not the average viewer overseas.” China has the infrastructure but not the art. Its films are propaganda that looks like propaganda, which, as Joseph Nye taught us, is the one thing propaganda must never do.

And then there is India. India produces more films per year than any country on earth. It has the world’s largest film-viewing audience. Its cinema has historically reached Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. Raj Kapoor was bigger in the Soviet Union than any American actor. Yet India has no strategy, none, for using its cinema as a tool of global cultural influence. The government taxes the film industry. It does not fund it as a strategic asset. There is no Indian equivalent of Korea’s KOCCA, Japan’s Cool Japan Fund, or Turkey’s drama export strategy.

I wrote last week in “A Rising Power with a Retreating Voice” that India is the only major power without a global information infrastructure. Russia has RT in eleven languages. China has CGTN. The UK funds the BBC World Service. India has nothing. But this piece adds a dimension that the previous one did not explore. India may not need a news empire as its first move. It needs what Korea built: a strategic cultural export infrastructure that uses entertainment, films, music, digital content, and streaming platforms to shape how the world perceives India. The content already exists. India produces it on an industrial scale. What does not exist is the strategy, the institutional framework, and the political imagination to turn domestic cultural production into global soft power.

India’s cinema speaks to Indians with extraordinary power. It does not yet speak to the world. Raj Kapoor spoke to Moscow, and Cairo, and Athens in the 1950s without a single rupee of government support. Seventy years later, India’s film industry is a hundred times larger, and its global voice is a fraction of what it was. Dhurandhar, for all its Rs 2,350 crore, is banned in the Gulf, unwatched in Africa, unknown in Latin America, and invisible in Europe. It is the most successful Indian film franchise in history, and it speaks only to Indians. It is a campaign that wins every constituency at home and loses every one abroad.

Raja Harishchandra

From Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra in 1913 to Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar duology in 2025-26, Indian cinema has been the longest-running political campaign in the country’s history. It predates the Republic. It predates independence. It predates every political party that currently exists. Phalke screened India’s first feature film fourteen years before the RSS was founded, thirty-four years before independence, and thirty-seven years before the Constitution was adopted.

Every era got the cinema it deserved. Colonial India got allegory and resistance encoded in mythological films. Nehruvian India got socialist idealism wrapped in love stories that conquered the Soviet Union. Emergency India got the angry young man who fought the system when the citizen could not. Liberalisation India got the NRI romance and the diaspora dream. Modi’s “New India” got the nationalist revenge fantasy that grosses Rs 2,350 crore and fills theatres for seven hours.

The question is not whether cinema is political. It always has been, from the moment the British censors forced the removal of “Swaraj” from a film title in 1931, from the moment Indira Gandhi’s government destroyed every print of a satire it feared, from the moment MGR wore party symbols on screen, from the moment “How’s the josh?” migrated from a film dialogue to a Prime Minister’s rally, from the moment Dhurandhar blurred the line between a spy film and a national myth so completely that AI-generated images from the film now circulate as if they were real.

The question that matters is whether India will do with its cinema what Korea, Japan, Turkey, and even Pakistan are doing: turn it outward, make it speak to the world, and build the narrative infrastructure that outlasts any government. India has the world’s most powerful storytelling tradition. It has the world’s largest film industry. It has a 32-million-strong diaspora. It speaks languages that reach every continent. It has everything it needs except the strategy.

A Dhurandhar that speaks only to Indians is a campaign film. A Dhurandhar that speaks to the world would be a civilisational statement. The difference between the two is not talent or money or content. It is imagination. And institutional will.

India’s cinema remains, for now, what it has always been: the longest campaign in the history of political communication, talking only to itself. A Vishwaguru whose reel never leaves the room.