Best of BS Opinion: Dhurandhar marks India's newfound soft power ambitions

Today's Best of BS Opinion examines Labour's growth dilemma, the rise of Nitin Nabin, Dhurandhar's political messaging, and how AI-driven content excess is reshaping culture and power

Hello, and welcome to Best of BS Opinion, our daily newsletter that wraps up the day's opinion page for you.  UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced growth as his government's central mission, and drawn a moral line between Labour and Reform UK, invoking British and democratic values to paint the populist party as beyond the pale. But the contrast between these two themes reveals a deeper problem: growth, in and of itself, has no moral valence, write Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel. Growth can drive innovation and prosperity, but it is not a mission objective, only a metric. And metrics divorced from purpose can be dangerous, which is why clearly stated missions matter - they align economic activity around clear goals. The authors ask what if Labour made peace a mission, because unlike growth, it is not morally neutral. Peace makes for great optics, but it could be even more powerful as an organising principle for the economy. Ironically, US President Donald Trump recognises the power of this narrative better than Starmer.  The appointment of Nitin Nabin as the Bharatiya Janata Party's working president has been a while in the making, albeit slowly and over the years, writes Aditi Phadnis. The real boost to his career came in 2019, when he was put in charge of the party’s campaign in the Sikkim Assembly polls. While the party's performance was sub-par, his appointment meant that he got a chance to interact with central leaders, elevating him above and beyond youth politics. But the turning point was the BJP's unexpected Assembly win in Chattisgarh in 2023, spearheaded by Nabin who worked hard to take the party across the winning line. He was made 'party in-charge' of the state for his efforts, a major elevation. Little attention is also paid to his tenure as minister in the Bihar administration, a job he discharged with characteristic thoroughness. His strength lies in his affability and humility - while other leaders of his standing revel in flamboyance, he distrusts it.  Shekhar Gupta approaches two vastly different films - Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar and Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan - using the same metrics of politics, nationalism, and religion, and comes away with very different analyses. While Pathaan was clinically devoid of politics, its sense of nationalism was one of Indian and Pakistani operatives working together. Religion was a no-no, too, allowing both liberals and nationalists to view it as a piece of paisa-vasool entertainment, nothing more, nothing less. Dhurandhar, he writes, is the opposite, which makes it among the most significant political movies in the history of Bollywood. On politics, it clearly demarcates a pre- and post-2014 response to Pak-sponsored terrorism, a celebration almost of the Modi-Doval era. Nationalism is the strongest impulse of Dhurandhar, showing clearly that Modi's New India now refuses to play victim. As for religion, it very clearly posits the perpetrators as Muslim acting in the name of their faith. The fundamental differences on these three key issues make Dhurandhar that much more controversial and polarising than Pathaan. In its direct, violent, and rude way, Dhurandhar marks the rise of the new-generation Indian soft power.  Even as AI-generated content floods the internet, Sandeep Goyal notes that Merriam-Webster has, rather appropriately, chosen the word 'slop' as its Word Of The Year. The four-letter word is a succinct definition, he says, of the current state of the internet, a sprawling glut of low-quality content that is clogging screens and social media feeds. The wave of AI slop reflects not just how easy it has become to generate content at scale, but also how little of it resonates with human audiences, raising the question of quality because at the other is near-flawless, top-quality AI creative that will be created and sold at premium. But going deeper, 'slop' isn't just a funny word, it's a symptom of deeper trends in AI deployment, content moderation and cultural perception., which is why the 2025 Word of the Year is a reminder that quality still counts and sometimes language itself can call it out.  Kumar Abishek also weighs in on Dhurandhar, noting it arrives at a moment when India is beginning to see how films shape the way societies imagine power. Its significance is in its institutional storytelling. Individual heroics are tied to bureaucracy, patience, and an invisible state machinery. The US has effectively used Hollywood to project soft power. Indian spy cinema, on the other hand, largely went the Bond way: Glamorous lone operatives, exaggerated villains, and wallpaper institutions. Dhurandhar changes this. Intelligence is shown as a system, reframing Indian intelligence as an instrument of long-term statecraft. It places India on a more mature axis, more concerned with credibility. While military-supported films may sanitise violence and marginalise civilian suffering, to dismiss them as propaganda is intellectually lazy. Democracies that remain silent cede the narrative ground to caricature, misinformation, or hostile framing.