The Spy Who Stirred Balochistan

A Bollywood thriller has put Pakistan’s restive province in the spotlight—and provoked an unexpected backlash from the very people it claims to champion 

WHEN Ranveer Singh strides across a dusty Balochistan hillside in a black shalwar kameez, sunglasses glinting and Bahraini rap blaring, Indian audiences erupt in applause. In Dhurandhar, a big-budget espionage thriller released on December 5th, Mr Singh plays Hamza Ali Mazari, an Indian RAW agent posing as a Baloch gangster to thwart terror plots against India. The film, which has already grossed over ₹58 crore ($6.9m) in its opening weekend, is unapologetically patriotic. Yet in the real Balochistan—the impoverished, rebellion-scarred province that provides the movie’s most dramatic backdrop—the reaction has been far more complicated.

Dhurandhar is loosely stitched together from several real events: the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai massacre and the 2012 Pakistani army operation against Lyari gangs in Karachi. The villain, Rehman Dakait (played with icy menace by Akshaye Khanna), is a Baloch crime lord who moonlights as an asset for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Arms flow from Baloch rebel caches, ISI officers poison schoolchildren as collective punishment, and a mass grave of tiny bodies is unearthed in the desert. India, the film suggests, is merely responding to threats incubated in Pakistan’s lawless western marches.For many Indian viewers, the Balochistan sequences are revelatory. Few had heard of the province’s decades-long insurgency against Islamabad, or of documented allegations of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and resource exploitation. Clips of the school-poisoning scene have gone viral on social media, accompanied by captions decrying Pakistani brutality. “Finally someone is showing the truth,” reads one typical comment.Yet Baloch activists are furious. “They turned our freedom fighters into gun-runners for the ISI and our people into untrustworthy crocodiles,” says Mir Yar Baloch, a prominent exile leader based in Europe. He objects to lines such as “You can trust a crocodile, but never a Baloch” and to the celebration of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in a gangster’s den. The film, he argues, conflates a tiny criminal fringe with an entire ethnic group that has historically suffered at Islamabad’s hands. “If Bollywood really wants to help us, make a film about our real patriots, not caricatures.”The irony is thick. India’s official policy has long been to spotlight Baloch grievances as a counterweight to Pakistan’s use of Kashmir in international forums. Prime Minister Narendra Modi first broke the taboo in his 2016 Independence Day speech, openly referring to “the people of Balochistan” who thanked him for raising their plight. Dhurandhar is the most mainstream cultural expression of that shift. Yet in trying to dramatise Pakistani perfidy, the filmmakers have ended up stereotyping the victims.The controversy has also reignited a quieter debate about narrative ownership. Bollywood has a long history of borrowing real tragedies for mass entertainment—often with little consultation of the communities involved. The Baloch case is particularly sensitive because their struggle remains largely invisible in global media. “We don’t mind India talking about us,” says a Quetta-based student activist who asked not to be named. “But at least get the story right.”Back in Indian cinemas, few seem troubled by the nuance. The film’s tagline—“Power is not given, it is taken”—resonates powerfully in a country that sees itself as surrounded by hostile neighbours. Whether Dhurandhar ultimately helps or harms the Baloch cause may depend less on its box-office fortunes than on whether anyone in Mumbai is listening to the protests from across the border.For now, the lion of Balochistan remains a Bollywood villain. In the real province, the fight for dignity—and survival—continues without a soundtrack