In a scene from Siddharth Anand’s Fighter (2024), its villain Azhar Akhtar, a Mujahideen terrorist, mercilessly beats up Indian soldier Sukhdeep Singh while gleefully recounting how he had tortured Singh’s contemporary: chopping his fingers off one at a time, cutting up his body while he was still alive, and burning “mother India’s flag” in front of him. All because the soldier dared to keep saying “Jai Hind” while in Pakistani captivity. “Then I cut off his tongue,” Akhtar continues, kicking Singh to a pulp and daring him to “say ‘Jai Hind’”. Akhtar’s relentless assault is only suddenly stopped by – slow pan – the protagonist: Shamsher “Patty" Pathania. Cue background music.
“Say it,” Patty urges the battered Singh, who obliges: “Jai Hind! Jai Hind!” Invigorated by the chant, Patty overpowers Akhtar as they dramatically face off to an ever-heightened background score. The rest of the showdown includes now much-discussed dialogues about India being the rightful “malik” of “PoK” and Patty threatening to make every Pakistani street and neighbourhood into “ India-Occupied-Pakistan. Each word is punctuated with a punch. “Today Pakistan might be your father,” Patty says, “but Hindustan is my mother!”