From 'Lakshya' to 'Fighter', How Far Have We Come?

Both Farhan Akhtar's 'Lakshya' and Siddharth Anand's 'Fighter' starred Hrithik Roshan in the lead role.

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!”

Bollywood has become increasingly obsessed with stories about Pakistan and Islamic terrorism. Such films and TV shows don’t form a monolith however, but exist on a spectrum. From those high on “josh” like Uri (2019), Bhuj (2021), and Gadar 2 (2023), to rarer, more nuanced films like Raazi (2018), which highlight the pitfalls of war and avoid harmful generalisations about the “enemy”. From explicitly anti-Muslim cinema like The Kashmir Files (2022) and The Kerala Story (2023), to more subtly Islamophobic ones like Sooryavanshi (2021), Mission Majnu (2022), and Indian Police Force (2023) that also include token “Good Muslim” characters. There is a range, yes, but cumulatively, the ubiquity of these kinds of stories reflects a larger, muscular Hindu nationalism which peddles prejudice against not only Pakistan but also Indian Muslims. The point here is not that war and cop films should never be made – that’s unrealistic and unfair – but that they are in danger of dominating our cultural production and national consciousness. What we should be moving towards, instead, is a more progressive and inclusive patriotism.

Fighter is inspired by Tom Cruise’s Top Gun franchise. While it can certainly be criticized for idolizing the US military, the latest film Top Gun: Maverick (2022) deliberately obfuscates the enemy’s origins to avoid “othering” a particular country as a villain. The film exists in a fantasy realm, seeking to use slick, stylish action for relatively benign entertainment – much like Anand’s previous spy films. Pathaan (2023), for instance, doesn’t give its antagonist Jim a religious or ethnic affiliation, and its titular protagonist both collaborates with and falls for a Pakistani agent to fight against Jim. Fighter, on the other hand, explicitly adapts real events – the 2019 Pulwama attack and subsequent Balakot Airstrike – as a springboard for war-mongering against Pakistan.

A useful comparison here is a war film from twenty years ago, also starring Hrithik Roshan: Lakshya (2004), directed by Farhan Akhtar. On the surface, Lakshya and Fighter appear quite similar. Both celebrate the Indian Armed Forces and portray real conflicts between India and Pakistan, with the former as heroes and the latter as villains. But tonally, these movies couldn’t be more different. While Fighter is a shrill glorification of masculine, jingoistic heroism, Lakshya is a slow-burning, brooding veneration of the bravery, honour, and discipline of the armed forces. It’s got more heft and gravitas. While Fighter calls for war, Lakshya bids for peace. “How quickly a soldier dries up his tears,” laments Subedar Maj. Pritam Singh to protagonist Captain Karan Shergill after some soldiers are tragically killed. “People tell us that war is a bad thing. Ask them who knows this better than a soldier.” “Then why are there wars?” Karan asks, to which Pritam poetically responds, “The creator created just one Earth, but the greed of humans drew lines on it with iron and explosives.” Many such scenes are infused with melancholy as the film sensitively depicts the loss of life in war.

Lakshya’s relatively progressive politics are also portrayed through the character of Romila "Romi" Dutta, who is introduced organizing a protest in college. She is portrayed as conscientious and genuinely caring for her community, rather than anti-national. The film represents her desire to be a journalist as a noble and worthy way of contributing to her country, and her reporting on the Kargil War is exalted as heroic. She also delivers a key anti-war monologue in the film, passionately asking: “When will people understand that war is not the solution to problems?”

Lakshya is not entirely free of jingoism – maybe no commercial Bollywood war film ever can be. But while Fighter’s plot, characters, and action are in service of reiterating to Pakistan who the real “baap” is, Lakshya uses the war film template as a canvas to produce a sensitive romance drama as well as a coming-of-age story. In one scene, Karan wonders to Romila what life in certain villages was like before the war. He points to a building of a school now taken over by soldiers, the village mosque, and the panchayat. “Now there are none,” he mourns, to which Romila notes, “You’ve changed.” Karan’s care and anguish at the loss narratively signal his maturation. If a film were telling the story of a soldier in the Kargil War today, it would simply focus on unabashedly celebrating his heroism and masculinity. (Isn’t that just the plot of Shershaah (2001)?

Lakshya is a wonderful counterexample to the politics and tonality of Fighter and the bombardment of other Bollywood war (mongering) films coming out today. It can remind us of a different time in 2004, when Veer and Zaara could marry and Indian Ex-Major Raghavan Dutta was the villain and not the hero of Main Hoon Na.

Or maybe not that much has changed, after all. Lakshya was a commercial flop. Gadar was the biggest hit of 2001, and its sequel one of the biggest hits of 2023. Maybe we always had this coming.

Either way, we need to be rescued from this relentless assault.