The Kandahar Lie That ‘Dhurandhar’ Won’t Touch

The Kandahar Lie That ‘Dhurandhar’ Won’t Touch

By Jameel Aahmed Milansaar

This isn’t a film review but a necessary ideological critique—one that challenges the propaganda narrative surrounding Dhurandhar and exposes the deep hypocrisy that fuels the Sangh’s version of “patriotism.”

The new Hindi film Dhurandhar does not merely distort history; it weaponises a national tragedy to launder the image of the Sangh Parivar and shift blame away from those in power. At the heart of this narrative lies a calculated lie about the Kandahar hijacking—one that turns the real authors of the “Hindus are cowards” insult into self-styled guardians of Hindu bravery.​

After the Kandahar IC-814 hijacking on 24 December 1999, the Vajpayee government released three jailed terrorists in exchange for 155 passengers and 11 crew members, a decision widely seen as a moment of national humiliation. In the public anger that followed, it was not Pakistan, not the hijackers, but the RSS that branded the “Hindu samaj” as cowardly, carefully redirecting outrage away from the political leadership.​

In a column in Panchajanya, then RSS chief Rajendra Singh “Rajju Bhaiya” wrote that the hijack had revealed a deep-rooted cowardice in Hindu society, arguing that Hindus should never fear death and that a handful of young men on board could have overpowered the terrorists. He even suggested that the intensity of protests by passengers’ families was unbecoming of a “decent and dignified society,” converting grief and fear into a moral indictment of ordinary citizens rather than a critique of state failure.​

This is where the Sangh’s ideological sleight of hand becomes visible: by framing the tragedy as a test of individual bravery rather than of governance, it quietly moved accountability away from the Vajpayee government and toward the public. Embedded in this rhetoric was a not-so-subtle recruitment message—only an RSS-shaped Hindu, drilled in “veerta,” could be trusted not to “fail” the nation the next time.​

The VHP’s working president at the time, Ashok Singhal, pushed this logic further in a notorious remark that shifted responsibility from the state to one man in the cockpit. Asked whether the government had shown courage, he replied that it was not the government but the pilot who should have been brave—“If the pilot had courage, he would have refused to fly the hijacked plane.”

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Captain Devi Saran, the pilot of IC-814, responded by calmly exposing the moral bankruptcy of this claim. He pointed out that those attacking him neither understood aviation nor the value of innocent lives, and reminded them that even in the Mahabharata, Sri Krishna tried his best to avert bloodshed before Kurukshetra. Speaking first as a human being, and only then as a Hindu, he asked whether these self-proclaimed custodians of courage had even met the passengers’ and crew’s families during the crisis days.​

Passengers themselves later contradicted the “cowardice” narrative in accounts that described how, when talks collapsed and the hijackers threatened to blow up the aircraft, Captain Saran briefed them on opening emergency exits and was prepared to risk his own life by preventing take-off and crashing the plane into a barrier so others could escape. Their question to Singhal was searing in its simplicity: if he was so courageous, why did he not go to Kandahar to confront the hijackers himself?​

Once confronted with these testimonies, the Sangh Parivar quietly dropped the subject, abandoning a line of attack that had backfired by exposing its distance from both human empathy and operational reality. What remained, however, was the ideological residue: a narrative in which ordinary Hindus and frontline professionals could always be blamed for “cowardice,” while the political and organisational leadership stayed above scrutiny.​

Placed against this backdrop, Dhurandhar is not just a film but part of a deliberate project of memory management, where cinema is used to overwrite the historical record of Kandahar with a more convenient script. In that script, the Sangh Parivar is recast from a force that once vilified its own society and evaded responsibility into the heroic custodian of courage and national will.

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The Kandahar That Dhurandhar Won’t Touch
This piece isn’t a film review—it’s an ideological reckoning. Beyond the cinematic gloss and patriotic posing lies a story the propaganda machine refuses to confront. Dhurandhar may claim to champion nationalism, but what it truly reveals is the Sangh’s selective morality and its warped idea of patriotism. My article dismantles that illusion and exposes the deeper hypocrisies buried beneath the rhetoric.

https://jameelblr.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-kandahar-lie-that-dhurandhar-wont.html