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In the 2004 Hindi war film Lakshya, soldiers of the Indian army take their commanding officer, Colonel Sunil Damle (Amitabh Bachchan), to see the bodies of Pakistani combatants who have fallen during the Battle of Tiger Hill.
Damle orders that the bodies be buried according to traditions and rituals.
But some of the soldiers seem displeased with his order. When one of his officers is asked what the matter is, he replies, “I think they remember how the Pakistanis sent back the bodies of our martyrs-- mutilated.”
Damle, however, declares, “There is a difference between us and them. And this difference should remain…This is the Indian army. Even in a battle, we must have some decency.”
This gesture gives the Indian soldiers an ethical superiority over their rivals. Even if they must kill, they do so in defence of their country.
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“War is part of the story of the Indian nation,” writes philosophy scholar Samir Chopra in his book Bollywood Does Battle: The War Movie and the Indian Popular Imagination (2020).
“(I)ts presence in India’s past continues to shape the Indian present and future.”
India became independent in 1947 and went to war with Pakistan a few weeks later. Subsequently, it had wars with China in 1962, and with Pakistan in 1965, 1971, and 1999.
All these conflicts have been depicted in films over the years, making war one of the key genres of Bollywood.
“War, in the Indian cinematic understanding, is not an occasion for glory, but for painful sacrifice,” writes Chopra. “War is an unfortunate imposition on a nation imbued with an ethos of non-violence, fought by honourable Indians of all religions and ethnicities for the right reason -- the defence of the nation -- but only when forced to.”
In films like Haqeeqat (1964), Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973), Vijeta (1982), Border (1997), and Lakshya (2004), Indian soldiers are never the aggressors -- they are only defending their country.
In recent years, however, this attitude has changed in war films such as Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) or Fighter (2024). The first one dramatised India’s reported “surgical strike” on terror camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir across the Line of Control (LoC) on 26 September 2016.
The strikes were carried out in response to a terror attack, allegedly by Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), on an Indian Army camp in the town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir.
Similarly, Fighter dramatises strikes carried out by the Indian Air Force near Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on 26 February 2019, with Indian jets entering the Pakistani air space for the first time since the 1971 subcontinental war for the independence of Bangladesh.
This was a response to the Pulwama incident, in which a suicide bomber had targeted a military convoy in Kashmir, killing 40 paramilitary personnel. The JeM had also claimed responsibility for it. Pakistan’s retaliatory air strike on 27 February 2019 led to a month-long military stand-off between the two nations.
In both films, army and air force officers leading the campaigns are driven by a desire for retribution. In both films, they cross the LoC to “teach the enemy a lesson”. This is a complete contrast to Lakshya, where Damle instructs his battalion that they are not to cross the LoC for any reason whatsoever. The change in the attitude of the films reflects a change in India’s defence policy-- but, more importantly, in the political rhetoric around it.
On 4 April, The Guardian reported that the Indian government had allegedly ordered assassinations of dissidents and terrorists on foreign soil, particularly Pakistan. Anonymous Indian intelligence officials also told the newspaper that the Indian government had decided to target terror operatives in Pakistan following the Pulwama incident. The officials told the reporters that they had drawn inspiration from Israel’s Mossad, Russia’s KGB, and the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, allegedly by Saudi officers.
While the Ministry of External Affairs has categorically rejected the claims, both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh seem to have confirmed these operations. At an election rally on 11 April, Modi claimed, “Today, the world also knows that Modi’s new India enters people’s homes to hit them.” And Singh told News18 during an interview: “This is India’s strength. We are now capable of doing that and Pakistan has also started realising this.”
In fact, the exact Hindi words Modi used: “atankwaadiyon ko ghar mein ghus ke mara jata hai (our forces are killing terrorists on their own turf)” echo a similar dialogue in the film Uri. When Indian soldiers are killed in the Uri terror attack, National Security Advisor (NSA) Govind Bhardwaj (Paresh Rawal), based on India’s NSA Ajit Doval, advises a surgical strike, he also says, “This India will not keep quiet. This is a new India. It will enter their homes and kill them, too.”
Modi’s love for the film is no secret.
While inaugurating the National Museum of Indian Cinema in Mumbai on 19 January 2019, the PM had quoted a dialogue from the film, “How’s the josh?” The audience, comprising many senior members of the film fraternity, replied with another dialogue from the film, “High sir!” In Fighter, too, there is a reference to this dialogue. During a dinner of Indian Air Force officers, one of them cracks a joke: “How’s the gosht (meat)?” The others reply, “Tasty, sir!”
These intertextual references are arguably an attempt to create a set of signifiers that can immediately convey to the audience the ideology that threads through these films.
Both films retain some key features of Bollywood war films.
In neither is India the aggressor, nor does it show any territorial ambitions. The only aim of the Indian soldiers and strategists is to protect the country’s territorial sovereignty.
Their conduct is always upright and they are driven by an all-consuming patriotism. In fact, no opportunity is lost to waving the Tricolour. While the leading male characters in both films — Major Vihaan Singh Shergill (Vicky Kaushal) in Uri and Squadron Leader Shamsher Pathania (Hrithik Roshan) in Fighter are Hindu -- India’s religious minorities (Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs) are also equal and enthusiastic participants in the country’s defence.
But these films differ from their pre-2014 predecessors in their desire for vengeance, “to teach the enemy a lesson”. In Uri, Vihaan tells his commandos, “We didn’t start the fight, but we will bloody well end it.” In Fighter, following the Pulwama attack, senior army officers and strategists are in a meeting, discussing how to best respond. One officer suggests launching airstrikes on JeM camps in Pakistan. The NSA begins, “Sometimes the road of justice goes through…” “Revenge!” Shamsher finishes the sentence.
Vengeance, however, has diminishing marginal returns
Uri, which was released a month before the Pulwama attack, reaped the benefits of the heightened patriotism in the country during the India-Pakistan stand-off. Made on a budget of Rs 25 crore, it generated 876 per cent of the original cost at the box office. It also made Kaushal into a superstar. Fighter, which dramatised the Pulwama incident and its aftermath, sank at the box office despite being headlined by superstars Roshan and Deepika Padukone.
Its director, Siddharth Anand, who had delivered the hit Pathaan in 2023, bizarrely claimed that Fighter had flopped because 90 per cent of Indians had not flown in planes. But perhaps he -- and other filmmakers -- will wake up to the fact that fancy fighter jets and unrestrained dollops of patriotism are not enough to ensure a more than middling flight for their films. Revenge, perhaps, is a dish that has gone cold.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat
