New Delhi: When Dhurandhar, an Indian spy movie loosely based on Karachi’s infamous Lyari gang war, opened in cinemas on 5 December, something unusual happened: instead of the usual India-Pakistan good vs bad debate, Pakistanis began arguing with Pakistanis.
Aditya Dhar’s three-hour movie has divided them. For some, it is a reminder of their own country’s reluctance to tell its darker stories. For others, it is a reckless distortion of Karachi’s history, repurposed to stoke Indian nationalism. And for many Baloch viewers, it is another misfire in South Asia’s long record of misrepresenting their culture.
Perhaps no reaction captured this internal conflict better than that of content creator Bilal Hassan, known online as @mystapaki. In an Instagram review, he admitted that Dhurandhar is “very, very well made,” praising its action sequences, music, and Akshaye Khanna’s performance as a character modeled on the late Lyari ganglord Rehman Dakait.
But the sting, he insisted, was not the propaganda. It was Pakistan’s own abdication.
“I grew up seeing the Lyari gang wars,” he says in the video. “Chaudhry Aslam’s house was in front of my school… That’s how close this story was for me.” And yet, he noted, Pakistan’s film and television industry has avoided exploring that history with any seriousness, preferring safer plots and forgettable romances. “We won’t tell this story… so instead we greenlight scripts like Love Guru.”
This sentiment echoed widely across Pakistani social media.
Journalists, academics and former residents of Lyari have been quick to note the film’s factual inaccuracies.
The real Lyari gang war, they argue, was a hyper-local conflict between Karachi’s political parties—particularly the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM)—and rival criminal groups led by figures like Rehman Dakait, Arshad Pappu and Baba Ladla. India, they say, did not feature in the story at all.
“India is nowhere in this,” Karachi-based journalist Ebad Ahmed, who has reported extensively on Lyari, told ThePrint. “These were local political phenomena. Hyper-local. To tie them to international terror networks is nationalistic fiction,” he adds.
The film’s decision to merge the Lyari storyline with the 2008 Mumbai attacks has been especially criticised as an attempt to fold a Pakistani urban conflict into India’s contemporary nationalist imagination.
Cultural critic Asif Rana argued that while some visual details like wardrobes, props, and Lyari’s landmark gate are actually accurate, the broader geopolitics are off.
“Anyone who knows Karachi can tell you these people had no interest in India. None,” he said.
Representation or misrepresentation?
The film’s depiction of Baloch culture, especially Akshaye Khanna’s viral entry sequence, has sparked its own debate. The scene, set to a Bahraini Arabic-rap track, has been both celebrated and condemned among Baloch viewers.
Taj Baloch of the Baloch Human Rights Council praised the actors’ pronunciation of Balochi words, calling it “impossibly original” and insisting that the music, though not Balochi, did not feel out of place.
“I was amazed by their pronunciation of every Balochi word. Some vowel sounds are impossible to be pronounced by non-Balochi speakers but are pronounced well,” Taj, who is also a linguist, told ThePrint.
But others disagree. Mir Baloch, another Baloch viewer, told The Print that he found the sequence jarring.
“Balochi is completely different from Arabic and Persian. Seeing a rap song in traditional Balochi attire just doesn’t sit right. It feels like a misrepresentation… Bollywood is doing what the Pakistani state has done for years.”
Then, the film’s portrayals of real Pakistani political figures have opened yet another front.
Muneeb Qadir, a Pakistani author, noted on X that a character resembling PPP politician Nabil Gabol appears in the film under a different name—with an Indian spy as his son-in-law.
“Now, who is Nabil Gabol’s son-in-law in real life? This film has given me some food for thought,” he wrote.
Sumeta Afzal Syed, a spokesperson for the Sindh government, condemned the “unlawful” use of Benazir Bhutto’s image in scenes suggesting her party’s sympathy for militants. “The PPP has been a frontline victim of terrorism,” she wrote.
Others responded bluntly: if the party objects, they argued, it might reflect anxieties about its own uneasy history with Lyari’s gangs. Dakait was a well-known PPP supporter and in 2007, when a bomb blast occurred in Benazir Bhutto’s car in Karachi, many claim Dakait was with her and saved her.
Also read: Dhurandhar trailer has amused Pakistanis. Kids are calling Ranveer Singh to Karachi
Internal gang wars
Dakait was an infamous Lyari gang leader who shot to fame during the gang war era in Karachi and was known for having killed someone when he was 13 and even stabbed his own mother to death.
According to a 2010 Express Tribune article, rising from a member of Haji Laloo’s gang to become its chief, Dakait became a central figure in Lyari’s gang wars. His ascent was supported by longstanding political patronage, particularly from the PPP. In a vacuum left by weak governance and law enforcement, he provided jobs, weapons, and protection to local youth, expanding his influence, the article noted.
After the PPP’s 2008 election victory, Dakait attempted to legitimise himself, adopting the name Sardar Abdul Rehman Baloch and forming the People’s Aman Committee (PAC), an organisation seen as aligned with the PPP.
In 2009, he was gunned down in what was labelled a ‘staged’ encounter by Lyari SP Chaudhury Aslam.
Human rights lawyer Shafiq Ahmed found a different kind of inaccuracy: the film repeatedly refers to Chaudhry Aslam as Punjabi. “He was a Swati,” Ahmed wrote on X in Urdu, before adding “though his mindset was that of the Punjabi military.”
To many Pakistanis, Dhurandhar is less a film about them than a reminder of what Pakistan’s own cultural industries have avoided.
According to Asif Ali, Lyari is one of Karachi’s most culturally rich neighbourhoods, shaped by Baloch, Sindhi, Punjabi, Iranian and Muhajir influences, but it has rarely been portrayed onscreen with complexity. Its history of union politics, community activism, street schools, music, and football is far richer than its reputation as a gangland.
Yet even the gang war remains a story never fully owned—one filled with political patronage, class divides, and characters whose transitions from labourers to warlords are stranger than fiction.
In the absence of a homegrown narrative, an Indian one has arrived. And Pakistanis are left to choose whether to reject it, grudgingly admire it, or regret that the story wasn’t theirs to tell in the first place.
Karachi-based journalist and researcher Rabia Mushtaq, who has long studied Lyari’s politics, told ThePrint that Dhurandhar wildly distorts the neighbourhood’s history. By blending facts with fiction and “cherry-picking” details for drama, she said, the film feels less like a portrayal of Karachi and more like an attempt to flatter India’s ruling party.
Lyari, she noted, is far more complex than the violent caricature onscreen, yet the movie piles together terror attacks without context and stretches its story into two parts that “reflect Bollywood’s obsession with Pakistan.”
For Mushtaq, such nationalist storytelling is dangerous. “At a moment when India and Pakistan only recently stepped back from the brink of conflict, the film is an irresponsible attempt that risks deepening public hostility between the neighbours,” she added.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)