Scripting Hate: Bollywood’s Anti-Pakistani Cinematic Storm

Dr Attiq-ur-Rehman

The evolution of decades-long India-Pakistan rivalry cannot be divorced from the role of active hostile narratives emerging from both states’ mainstream film industry, where the role of Bollywood always remained proactive and dominating in South Asia media warfare. The overwhelming prevalence of media warfare has pushed the protracted conflicted interaction of the two states beyond their conventional territorial clashes and started targeting the cultural values of each other, where Pakistan emerged as the prime target of the Indian silver screen.

Bollywood has become a strategic medium for propagating Hindutva-influenced, anti-Pakistan narratives under the Modi regime.

This trend has shaped specific public opinion rooted in politically unfriendly and diplomatically aggressive narratives of New Delhi under its ideologically driven South Asian policy. In this debate, the position of the Indian film industry is significant because it is internationally known as the primary source of projecting New Delhi’s specific political agenda, cemented in Hindutva ideology and its anti-Pakistani cinematic descriptions. In this way, the prevailing shadows of Hindutva ideology under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule have transformed the role of Bollywood from a key factor of Indian diplomacy and worldwide projection of New Delhi’s soft image to a mainstream source of generating various political propaganda concentrating on Islamabad.

The multi-layered integration of this propaganda with New Delhi’s long-standing opposition to Pakistan’s creation as a result of the historical subcontinent’s partition has become the prime source of the current Indian government’s strategic aspirations, determined to stigmatize the national image of Pakistan in the regional and global affairs.

The configuration of Bollywood with such hostile attributes of New Delhi’s foreign relations has raised various questions on the credibility of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which is a legal body functioning under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to provide certified approval to the Indian films for cinemas and television viewers. The CBFC’s political synchronization has forced its constitutionally legislative authorities to handle a broader anti-Pakistan agenda, which has jeopardized its aspired impartial and meritorious functioning within the state. 

An analytical survey of Bollywood’s leading productions for meeting particular political objectives suggests that the transformed role of the Indian film industry has witnessed a dramatic change cemented in different vicious narrations of demonizing Pakistan beyond South Asian regional affairs. The movies’ popular songs laced with glamorous dances, politically-influenced scripts and harsh dialogues are important in reinforcing the anti-Pakistani public sentiments rooted in systematic propaganda ingrained in long-standing New Delhi-Islamabad hostile relations.

The chest-thumping dialogues covered in the BJP’s exclusive patriotic expressions in several movies attempt to show the multipronged offensive stretches of Indian strategic muscles over South Asian territorial and maritime domains. The script-hated movies structured on the depiction of New Delhi’s growing offensive aspirations for dominating the regional territorial and maritime affairs of the nuclearized subcontinent generally communicate to the world the evolving strategic inclinations of New Delhi in its home region.

Politically scripted films depicting Pakistan as a hostile, extremist state dominate Indian cinema and global digital platforms.

While showing the dominating role of Indian regular armed forces in the region, the politically influenced movie stories generally describe “Strong India, Weak Pakistan” with the support of specific manipulated facts and inaccurate information. The rise of the BJP’s rule in New Delhi under Narendra Modi’s Hindu-inclined nationalist policies has also started targeting the ideological foundations of Pakistan, rooted in core Islamic principles.

So, a large number of movies based on Islamophobia content in the dialogues show carefully engineered religious propaganda to portray Pakistan as a land of fanatical ideological tendencies. It has made the Indian film industry a well-structured and politically supported ideological project fuelling the South Asian debates of Islamophobia without estimating its impacts on the scope of perpetual peace and long-lasting stability in the region.

The overwhelming growth of global digital culture in the post-COVID world has introduced numerous online movie channels around the world, which has facilitated New Delhi’s augmenting of its ongoing scripted antipathy towards Pakistan. A mushroomed growth of online movie websites and social media forums revolutionized the production of the Indian silver screen on several topics based on emotionally charged nationalistic dialogues showing the Pakistani government, public and armed forces as villains.

The movies on armed clashes and border skirmishes with Pakistan always dramatized one-sided Indian victories, ignoring Pakistan’s efforts and proposals for generating peace in South Asia. The repetitive cinematic descriptions of Pakistan as a terrorist state with a barbarian population leave profound psychological impacts on its worldwide viewership under carefully designed Indian propaganda based on specific stereotyped phenomena.             

The transformation of the Indian film industry from silver screen to battlefield has become the undeniable reality of South Asian regional politics, which is degrading the scope of regional peace and stability under New Delhi’s multifaceted critical projection of Pakistan. The prevalence of such critical narratives on Bollywood has made it a powerful source of supporting New Delhi’s propagating political sentiments rooted in its ferocious ideological agendas.

The rise of politically influenced movie scripting cannot be treated as natural or accidental under the Modi administration because Modi’s broader ultra-nationalist ideology has made Bollywood a potential source of advancing systematic propaganda. This propaganda is broadly structured in the Modi government’s plans for degrading Pakistan’s worldwide soft image projection and Islamabad’s quest for improving its globally functioning active diplomatic forces.

The widespread prevalence of producing propagating movies recently emerged as profitable content for the Indian film industry because nationalist stories translate controversial regional issues in India’s favour on certain ideal grounds and generally stand high at the box office. Such movies cultivate considerable public popularity grounded in patriotic fervours that are parallel to providing various economic benefits and government support to its directors, producers, and actors.

The combination of commercial advantages and political sponsorships has increased the production of such movies under the Modi regime’s increasing reliance on the launching of media-centric disinformation campaigns. The threats of economic loss, public opposition, and political criticism have resulted in the imposition of self-censorship in the Indian film industry, where unbiased stories and positive or impartial portrayal of Pakistan always encompass the threats of inevitable government pressures and massive public boycotts. So, the leading production houses and popular film stars always prefer to avoid movie content and dialogues that directly or indirectly challenge the fixed cinematic descriptions of the India-Pakistan conflict.

In this way, the Indian government is required to carefully examine the growing violent tendencies of Bollywood, which are undermining the brief presence of diplomatic tools capable of legitimating the role of peace and stability in South Asia. The calculated use of cinema for the promotion of specific narratives and shaping critical public perceptions about Pakistan forces Islamabad-based policymakers to take adequate countermeasures under the regional political compulsions. It is pertinent to mention here that a brief depiction of India as a rival nation rarely appears in Pakistan cinema, which could not be treated as the essential and dominating feature of the country’s film industry.

Self-censorship and government patronage reinforce the commercial success of nationalist propaganda in Indian film production.

Contrasting with Pakistan’s productions on diverse topics, the recent tendencies of Indian filmmakers are centred on the anti-Pakistani interpretations of the BJP government, which hampers the conventional wisdom attached to the role of cultural diplomacy in South Asia.

Therefore, the Indian government is required to delink or minimize the role of its Bollywood-centric disinformation operations, which could spare the cultural diplomacy from its regional strategic aspirations targeting Pakistan. It could let the Indian film industry work independently beyond the government’s influences while generating debates on diverse topics, including peace with Pakistan and stability in South Asian nuclear politics.

The author is an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations, NUML, Islamabad. (arehman@numl.edu.pk). https://www.numl.edu.pk/faculty/446