India’s foreign policy no longer walks into Dhaka as a demarche. It drops into our week like a new OTT thriller, complete with teaser posters and a hashtag. Between August 2024 and February 2026, I watched that foreign policy from two angles. In the Chief Adviser’s Office, we wrote statements and rebuttals for an interim government that Indian channels baptised as everything from “jihadi coup” to “Western puppet.” At home, YouTube shorts for Tehran and Dhurandhar kept playing on loop, as if the algorithm itself had been briefed by South Block. It is one thing to be misread by another capital. It is another to watch that misreading rehearse itself in Dolby surround.
Tehran (2025) arrived for me somewhere between a border incident and a fresh round of hoax videos about temple attacks. John Abraham plays an Indian operative moving through the Iran and Israel shadow wars, loosely pinned to the 2012 car bombing of an Israeli diplomat in Delhi. The plot does its duty. The image that lodged in my head was painfully simple: a mutilated rabbi, and on the wall behind him, “Palestine” scrawled like a smoking gun. “Free Palestine,” the phrase I had grown up seeing on banners, in student processions, in those tired posters that never peel off campus walls, is demoted in a single shot to bloodied set dressing in a terror scene. The slogan does not speak. It just glows, mute and guilty, in the background.
Outside the theatre, Delhi’s real West Asia policy is all hedging and homework. India is closer than ever to Israel, still buying oil from Iran, officially mouthing a solution built on two states while breaking into hives at the sight of a Gaza solidarity march. Tehran takes that entire tangle — energy dependence, diaspora pressure, American moods — and boils it down to a feeling you can carry home in your popcorn fingers. India as the tragic adult in a room full of zealots. Palestinian markers as atmospheric menace, not the visual shorthand of a grievance stretching back a century. It is not a briefing. It is a vibe. And vibes travel faster than South Block PDFs.
The morning after, I was back at my desk drafting yet another clarification that Bangladesh’s Palestine solidarity rallies did not make us an “emerging jihadi hub,” that a green flag in Chittagong was not a preview of the caliphate. I was not arguing only with anchors and anonymous handles. I was arguing with that shot on the wall, the one that had retrained millions of eyes to read “Palestine” as prop, not politics. In 140 minutes and one frame, Tehran had done what months of Indian talk shows could only attempt with blunt force: it turned a neighbour’s moral vocabulary into visual evidence for the prosecution.
For Bangladesh, this is not a theoretical complaint. Palestine has been part of our emotion for as long as I can remember, in khutbas (Friday sermons) and in slogans, in the banners of Islamist parties and leftist student fronts who agree on nothing else. The same students who were out on the streets in late 2024, dodging rubber bullets and tear gas in Dhaka, now go home and scroll the same platforms that will host Tehran. They see the word they chanted all afternoon repositioned on screen from struggle to smear. Indian prime time already plays Gaza as a Hamas loop. Tehran upgrades the production design. The next time a Bangladeshi undergrad lifts a Palestinian flag on campus, they will be waving against states, yes, but also against a cinematic mood that has already marked them as suspect.
If Tehran repaints the wallpaper, Dhurandhar (2025) walks into the frame and tells you who owns the house. Aditya Dhar’s espionage and gangland epic is stitched together from slices of familiar trauma: Karachi, Kandahar, Parliament, 26/11, assorted covert operations you can call “deniable,” all scored to a familiar mix of chants, strings and drone shots. Ranveer Singh’s Hamza is the state’s visible musculature, all fists and frowns. The film’s real devotional centre is a watchful National Security Adviser who pulls strings, takes calls, and suffers in tasteful silence for the nation. You do not need to be a South Asia watcher to decode the homage. If you have ever scrolled through an Indian news channel in the last decade, you know which silhouette they have traced.
Watching Dhurandhar while still employed by the Bangladeshi state felt less like viewing a film and more like watching a PowerPoint acquire lighting and a costume budget. By that point I had sat through months of Indian coverage that treated an uprising led by students in Dhaka as a jihadist rehearsal, that described our insistence on due process as softness, unseriousness, even treason. In Dhar’s universe, the NSA is never wrong, rarely questioned, always ready to do what weak or compromised politicians cannot. Critics in Mumbai called the film “overtly hyper-nationalist” and “as subtle as a troll.” Fair. Those adjectives still miss the core service the film performs. Somewhere between scene three and scene thirty, due process dies offscreen. No one investigates the murder. They stand up and clap at the funeral.
Offscreen, in the Delhi I had to engage from August 2024 onwards, that office came with a specific doctrinal CV: “defensive offence,” raids across borders, the view that neighbours like Bangladesh are problems to be “managed,” not publics to be persuaded. Around the same time, India’s parliamentary committee on external affairs warned that Bangladesh after Hasina, with Chinese, Turkish and Gulf footprints and a generation of young Bangladeshis newly allergic to Indian media, was Delhi’s “most formidable strategic challenge since 1971.” Put that sentence next to Dhurandhar’s haloed NSA and you get the temperature at which every future meeting on Teesta, transit or trade will simmer: paternal, locked in permanent crisis, impatient with the idea that a small country might have an opinion.
From my side of the border, trying to explain for the hundredth time that a demand for credible elections did not equal Talibanisation, I could feel how neatly Tehran and Dhurandhar closed the narrative loop. Tehran instructs you to read “Palestine” as the smear at a crime scene. Dhurandhar invites you to outsource all further thinking to a security patriarch who will handle it, preferably without witnesses. In that pairing, a Bangladeshi crowd with flags becomes, almost by default, a stack of files on an NSA’s desk, not a political subject with its own history, factions and foolishness. The camera has already done the redacting before the policy memo arrives.
If you sit where I sat between 2024 and 2026, wedged between press briefings, WhatsApp hoaxes and calls from bewildered correspondents late at night, the convergence stops being cute and starts feeling structural. An Indian anchor misreading a Dhaka protest is not being lazy. They are reporting from inside a universe already lit for them, one in which “Palestine” on a wall equals terror and a stern man in a Nehru jacket exists to discipline unruly Muslim neighbours. The official language of connectivity, trade, blue economy and shared prosperity floats on top like subtitles. The main track is still security, siege and salvation.
The asymmetry makes this more than an anecdote for media scholars. An interim government can hold a press conference. A streaming platform can replay Tehran and Dhurandhar in bedrooms, buses and airport lounges for years. We can send a clarification to one newsroom. The films brief millions. The next time a committee in Delhi sits down to discuss “options” on Bangladesh, the words in the room will owe as much to that mutilated wall and that saintly NSA as to any confidential cable from their High Commission in Dhaka. For a neighbour trying, however clumsily, to assert that it is a sovereign state and not a recurring plot device, that is a genuine security concern.
I did not always see it this way. As a teenager in Dhaka in the late 1990s, I watched Border on pirated VCDs like everyone else. India’s clean, noble war played out against faceless Pakistani treachery while Bangladesh’s messy birth stayed offscreen. The Bengali freedom fighter did not exist, only the Indian jawan with the better song and the better uniform. We still cheered when Sunny Deol and Jackie Shroff nodded to each other across impossible distances in the sky, feeling our genes for hating Pakistan kick in right on cue. Later came LOC, Gadar, the whole universe of immaculate Indian sacrifice and permanently suspect neighbours. Somewhere between the hand pump and the martyrdom in slow motion, a generation of us learned that some wars are pure and some countries only exist in establishing shots.
Years later, hunched over a laptop with yet another response to yet another Indian panel about “Bangladeshi infiltrators,” I realised that Border had not been a one-off. It was the pilot episode. Back then, India’s wars were pure and we were the silent backdrop. Today, we are both target and reluctant audience of a security cinema that has upgraded its budget and sharpened its lines, but not its gaze. The question for Dhaka is painfully simple: the next time Delhi’s camera pans east, do we still let ourselves be written as the problem to be solved, or do we insist, however awkwardly, on walking into the frame as ourselves?