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Dhurandhar, the controversy-stirring Bollywood film set in Karachi, has announced a release date for its second part. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is slated for release on March 19.

Loosely inspired by Lyari’s gang war, the Indian spy thriller — directed by Aditya Dhar — took both Indian and Pakistani audiences by storm, for reasons that ranged from appreciation to outrage. On Tuesday, the film’s star Ranveer Singh, who played an Indian spy infiltrating Lyari, unveiled the teaser for the sequel on social media, which is to no one’s surprise explicitly marketed as a revenge film.

Dhurandhar largely revolved around Singh’s character, an Indian intelligence operative using the alias Hamza Ali Mazari who eases his way into the inner circle of gang leader Rehman Dakait, played by Akshay Khanna. As Mazari steadily climbs the ranks to become one of Dakait’s most trusted men, the film leans heavily into the contested premise that Pakistan is involved in terror attacks across the world, particularly in India. This is something Pakistan has repeatedly denied.

The first film culminates with Mazari killing Dakait, clearing his path to ultimate power in Karachi’s criminal underworld, which is part of his quest to avenge his country’s ‘spilt blood’. The sequel is positioned as a direct continuation of that arc.

In the new teaser, Singh appears in a noticeably altered avatar with a cleaner, younger, but just as furious look. His hair is cropped short, replacing the long-haired fierceness of his character in the first film.

The teaser shows Mazari stepping into, and effectively replacing, Dakait’s role within Karachi’s political and criminal landscape, creating havoc in the streets of the city and avenging the ‘attacks’ in his country, one person at a time.

Several familiar faces flash by in the teaser, confirming their return for the sequel. Sanjay Dutt reappears as Chaudhry Aslam, alongside R Madhavan and Arjun Rampal, signalling continuity in both narrative and ideological tone.

The teaser ends where the first film once did, closing on the same line: “Yeh naya Hindustan hai, yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi aur maarega bhi (This is a new Hindustan; it will enter your home and kill you too).” The repetition is deliberate, leaving little ambiguity about the film’s central thesis — that a “new India” will not hesitate to cross borders to strike.

The dialogue is reminiscent of real-world political rhetoric. In March 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a strikingly similar statement while addressing a large public gathering as he criticised opposition parties for labelling air strikes on so-called terror camps in Pakistan an electoral gimmick, India Today reported.

“Yeh hamara siddhant hai, ghar mein ghus ke marenge (It is our principle to take the attack home),” Modi said, pointing at the crowd. “Chun chun ke hisaab lena meri fitrat hai (It is my nature to settle every score),” he added.

If box-office numbers alone were a measure of cultural value, Dhurandhar would stand unchallenged. Within just 24 days of its release, the period spy thriller amassed INR 6.9 billion at the Indian box office, according to The Indian Express, becoming the highest-grossing Hindi film domestically.

That record-breaking run was less like an anomaly and more like confirmation that propaganda-driven spectacles, when mounted at scale and fortified with star power, remain Hindi cinema’s most reliable commercial currency. With a sequel already locked in, and an even wider theatrical rollout planned, the Dhurandhar template shows no signs of exhaustion.