The Cop and the Gangster in Dhurandhar Were Both Real

On 9 January 2014, a car packed with explosives rammed a police convoy on Karachi’s Lyari Expressway. Four officers died, among them Senior Superintendent Chaudhary Aslam, a man who had already survived eight earlier attempts on his life and had earned the nickname “Pakistan’s toughest cop.” The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility within hours.

Twelve years on, Sanjay Dutt is playing him, in the biggest Hindi film in years.

That is the strange starting point of Dhurandhar, the Ranveer Singh spy thriller that opened in December and, by the time its sequel arrived the following March, had turned into one of the highest-grossing film series India has ever produced. The film also opens with an on-screen disclaimer insisting the opposite: that its story is fiction, and any resemblance to real people is “purely coincidental.” Both of those things are true at the same time, and sorting out which parts of Dhurandhar belong to which turns out to be a better story than the trailer lets on.

A disclaimer built to say nothing specific

The full text, as it runs before the film: “The film is a piece of fictional work inspired by some real life events… Certain characters, institutions, dialogues and events have been fictionalised and dramatised for cinematic purposes. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons… is purely coincidental.”

It is the standard studio hedge, and it is deliberately unhelpful. It does not say which characters are fictionalised and which are not, so the viewer is left to work that out alone, from press interviews, family objections, and old news archives. That is exactly the job this article is trying to do.

The gang war that actually happened

Karachi’s Lyari district spent most of the 2000s as a real battleground, run by criminal networks fighting over drugs, extortion and arms, often with political cover. Two of the men at the centre of that fight are now played by two of Bollywood’s biggest stars.

Sanjay Dutt’s character is built on the real Chaudhary Aslam, who rose through Sindh Police to lead the Lyari Task Force and spent years hunting the district’s gangs and, later, Islamist militants. Akshaye Khanna’s is built on Abdul Rehman Baloch, known as Rehman Dakait, who grew up in Lyari and by his twenties controlled much of its underworld through an outfit called the Peoples Aman Committee.

On 9 August 2009, Aslam’s task force tracked Dakait’s phone and killed him in what police called an encounter. Dakait’s widow called it a staged killing rather than a genuine shootout, and Pakistan’s Sindh High Court ordered an inquiry into Aslam over the death. Dakait’s funeral reportedly drew one of the largest crowds Lyari had seen. Neither man got to see how the story ended for the other’s family: Aslam was killed by the Taliban five years later, on the same expressway that runs past the neighbourhood both of them fought over.

Even the existence of a formally named “Operation Lyari” is murkier than the film implies. In an old interview clip that resurfaced around the film’s release, Aslam himself can be heard giving two different answers about it in the same conversation, at one point denying any such operation took place, at another citing 35 arrests. The history underneath Dhurandhar was contested before Bollywood got hold of it.

What the film adds on top

The film’s lead, Ranveer Singh’s character Jaskirat Singh Rangi, who operates undercover in Karachi under the alias Hamza, is where the fictionalising is most obvious. Many viewers assumed he was a direct portrait of Major Mohit Sharma, a real Indian Army officer honoured for undercover work, but director Aditya Dhar has said on record that Jaskirat is not any single person, rather a composite drawn from several real intelligence and special-forces figures. R. Madhavan’s character, an intelligence chief who steers the operation from Delhi, has widely been read as an echo of India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, though the film never says so directly.

In other words, the two men who actually killed each other in Karachi are named after real people. The agent the film invents to explain how India was supposedly involved in all of it is not.

Real headlines, stitched into a plot

Dhurandhar anchors its fiction to events that genuinely happened. It opens against the backdrop of the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 to Kandahar, and later folds in the 2001 Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai siege, reportedly splicing in transcripts of real intercepted calls between the attackers and their handlers. Even the film’s subplot about counterfeit Indian currency traced to Pakistan sits on real ground: India spent years dealing with high-quality fake notes linked to security paper meant only for its own mints, a scandal serious enough that the government eventually blacklisted the British firm that had supplied it. The specific mechanics the film invents to move that plot along are dramatised, but the underlying scandal was not.

A hit by any measure

Whatever license it takes, audiences showed up. Dhurandhar opened to roughly 28 crore rupees on its first day in India and crossed 1,000 crore worldwide within three weeks, becoming only the ninth Indian film ever to do so. By the end of its theatrical run it had become Ranveer Singh’s highest-grossing film and one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time, reportedly setting or breaking 25 separate box office records along the way. Its sequel opened even bigger, posting the biggest single-day Hindi opening India had seen and passing 1,600 crore worldwide within about eighteen days.

Reviewers gave the craft real credit: the Tarantino-style opening flourishes, Akshaye Khanna’s gleefully pulpy villain, and a performance from Ranveer Singh that critics called a genuine comeback. On Rotten Tomatoes the audience score sits above 95 per cent, a strong showing for a three-and-a-half-hour thriller.

Critics were split roughly along geography: reviews from India tended to praise the film’s ambition and technical polish, while several international reviewers pushed back on its portrayal of Pakistan and questioned whether the violence outran the storytelling. Aslam’s widow has separately objected to specific lines and scenes as inaccurate, saying the filmmakers never spoke to her or to journalists who covered her husband. It is worth knowing that disagreement exists. It has not stopped the film from becoming one of the biggest hits Indian cinema has produced.

The ending the film didn’t have to invent

Every fictional flourish in Dhurandhar, the composite spy, the Delhi mastermind, the tidy shape it gives a messy, disputed conflict, exists to make sense of a story that never actually resolved that cleanly. The real Aslam and the real Dakait did not get three hours and a redemption arc. One died in a police operation whose name he himself disputed. The other died on the same road, five years later, at the hands of people he had spent his career fighting. The movie can supply the agent who ties it all together. It cannot supply the ending. Karachi’s Lyari district already wrote that one, and it was not looking for an audience.