Aditya Dhar's 'Dhurandhar': How Ranveer Singh's new film goes beyond staging a cross-border conflict

With Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar once again turns to the intersection of history and national security, but this time he uses the grammar of a big-budget action thriller to explore how Pakistan’s intelligence establishment imagines its long confrontation with India. The film’s trailer suggests that Dhar isn’t just staging a cross-border conflict; he’s trying to dramatise the worldview that has shaped decades of covert operations.

The opening moment is a clue. Arjun Rampal appears as Major Iqbal, an ISI officer who recalls hearing Pakistan’s General Zia-ul-Haq speak of weakening India through “a thousand cuts.” Rampal’s character frames this not as a slogan but as an ideological inheritance, something he absorbed as a child and later internalised as a professional creed. Dhar immediately juxtaposes this memory with a disturbing scene of torture, signalling the ruthless, almost doctrinal commitment that drives the film’s antagonist.

Rather than retelling historical events, Dhurandhar traces the intellectual lineage of this strategy. Dhar situates the ISI’s worldview in the rhetoric of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose speeches in the late 1960s and during the 1965 war articulated a vision of perpetual struggle with India. Bhutto’s insistence on a “thousand-year war” and his argument that confrontation was a form of self-preservation formed the seed of what would later harden into a covert, attritional doctrine.

The trailer hints that Dhar uses these moments as psychological scaffolding to show how a nation’s political anxieties become an intelligence agency’s operating philosophy. After Pakistan’s defeat in 1971, the ISI recalibrated from conventional battlefields to proxy warfare, a shift Dhurandhar folds into its narrative as the starting point of an entrenched mindset.

It is presented as the internal logic through which Pakistan’s intelligence community sees power, pressure, and survival. The film appears to dramatise how this thinking seeps into individual officers, shaping their sense of duty, vengeance, and patriotism and how that, in turn, drives covert missions, insurgencies, and shadow wars.

Against this backdrop stands Ranveer Singh’s protagonist, a hardened operative navigating a world, defined by clandestine decisions made across the border.

While the trailer keeps its plot deliberately opaque, its thematic through-line is unmistakable- Dhurandhar is less about recreating real events and more about decoding a mindset. The history is factual; the story is fictional; but the psychological portrait, of how Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus interprets conflict with India, is meant to feel chillingly real.

Backed by Jio Studios along with B-62 Studios and featuring an ensemble of Arjun Rampal, Sanjay Dutt, R Madhavan, Akshaye Khanna, and Ranveer Singh, Aditya Dhar’s latest arrives in theatres on December 5. If Uri was about the execution of Indian strategy, Dhurandhar seems to reveal the ideology on the other side of the border, offering a glimpse into how Pakistan’s deep state sees the long game.