Cinema as Statecraft: How India’s Entertainment Industry Is Normalizing Anti Pakistan Sentiment

The global reach of streaming platforms has amplified Bollywood’s influence far beyond what theatrical release alone could once achieve.

Netflix’s Co-CEO recently noted that Dhurandhar became the platform’s most-watched non English film of 2026, drawing 37 million views within six months and topping charts across 22 countries. Such scale transforms what might once have been considered domestic entertainment into a matter of genuine regional consequence.

Dhurandhar’s depiction of Karachi’s Lyari neighbourhood, criticized by observers as reductive in its association with organized violence, drew considerable attention for how it portrayed a community shaped by generations of Baloch, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Muhajir heritage.

In response, Pakistan’s Sindh government announced a companion production, Mera Lyari, with officials noting that misrepresentation cannot erase reality. The episode is not isolated.

Operation Safed Sagar, a series revisiting the 1999 Kargil conflict, dramatizes political decision making in Islamabad in ways reviewers themselves describe as taking considerable creative liberty.

Chauhaan, still over a year from release, has already drawn concern for characterizing pellet-gun injuries in Kashmir a weapon whose documented human toll runs into the thousands as merely “limited damage.”

This pattern cannot be separated from its political context. Since 2014, under a BJP led government that has built domestic political capital on anti-Pakistan positioning, the emotionally charged rhetoric of the state has increasingly found its mirror in entertainment.

The idea that was once confined to campaign speeches and television debate panels now arrives as prestige drama and spy thriller spectacle, carrying cinema’s aesthetic authority rather than politics’ visible partisanship  reaching audiences who may not recognize it as politics at all.

A Pew Research Center survey published this month gives this pattern measurable weight 78% of Indians now hold an unfavourable view of Pakistan, including 65% who describe that view as very unfavourable.

Numbers this stark do not emerge from diplomacy or lived contact alone they are shaped by the stories a society is told about its neighbour, repeated at scale, across the platforms a generation actually watches.

That scale is the real concern not creative ambition, which has long been part of cinema’s tradition, but distribution. When a single production reaches tens of millions of viewers across dozens of countries within months, the line between dramatization and information blurs, particularly for younger viewers encountering a shared, complicated history through entertainment rather than education or balanced reporting.

Streaming platforms, unlike journalism, are not bound by editorial expectations of accuracy or balance, yet they increasingly function as a primary source through which a global generation forms its understanding of South Asian history and relations.

Netflix’s own commercial calculus compounds the problem.  India is amongst its largest and fastest growing markets, the platform has strong incentive to keep commissioning content that performs well with Indian audiences even content trading in one sided national narratives.

The result is a feedback loop charged storytelling drives engagement, engagement drives further investment, and the underlying resentment it reflects gets normalized as entertainment rather than examined as bias.

A generation that might otherwise engage with a shared, complex history through dialogue and mutual understanding instead risks absorbing a version of that history already inflected with hostility, at a scale that counter-narratives would struggle to match.

This asymmetry does not only shape perception it narrows the space available for the cross border, people to people engagement that younger generations might otherwise be positioned to build, pushing relations further toward permanent labeling rather than future possible cordiality.

This is not an argument for restricting creative expression or shielding difficult histories from the screen.

It is an appeal to storytellers, platforms, and audiences alike for a shared recognition that entertainment produced at this scale carries real diplomatic weight. The responsibility would serve not only bilateral relations, but the interests of the very generation being asked, in time, to shape the region’s shared future.