Dawn Images

Actor Yasir Hussain has weighed in on the success of Border 2, calling out Sunny Deol for once again fronting a film that glorifies war and feeds into the familiar cycle of anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim nationalism that Bollywood has increasingly leaned on in recent years.

Deol, whose latest film outing has crossed the $22 million mark at the box office since its January 23 release, shared a celebratory Instagram video last week. Sitting against a snowy backdrop, the actor loudly chanted one of his film’s lines, “Aawaz kahan tak gayi? (How far did the sound travel?)” following it up with, “Aapke dilo tak (All the way to your hearts).” Provocative? Maybe not to Indian viewers.

In the comments, Hussain offered a pointed response. Addressing Deol respectfully, he wrote that while he had grown up watching and admiring his films, “love reaches hearts, hatred doesn’t.”

He added that Border 2’s voice had only reached “the hearts of haters” and urged Deol to make at least one film like Ikkis, his father, the late Dharmendra’s anti-war project that focused on the human cost of conflict rather than chest-thumping nationalism.

Hussain’s comment hits a nerve because it taps into a wider discomfort around the kind of films currently dominating Bollywood’s box office. Directed by Anurag Singh and starring Deol alongside Varun Dhawan, Diljit Dosanjh and Ahan Shetty, Border 2 revisits the 1971 India-Pakistan war, dramatising coordinated operations by the Indian Army, Air Force and Navy.

Marketed as a spiritual successor to J P Dutta’s 1997 Border, the sequel swaps the earlier film’s emotional restraint for scale, spectacle and a far louder nationalistic pitch.

That pitch has clearly worked commercially. Culturally, however, it raises questions that Hussain alluded to. In recent years, Hindi cinema’s biggest earners — from Gadar 2 to Dhurandhar — have relied on simplified binaries of hero and enemy, where Pakistanis are convenient antagonists, stripped of context, complexity or humanity.

Hussain’s ask isn’t that war films shouldn’t be made, but that they shouldn’t only exist to affirm national pride or political narratives. Anti-war cinema, after all, doesn’t dilute patriotism; it questions blind faith. It forces audiences to confront loss, grief and moral ambiguity; things that don’t lend themselves easily to slow-motion action shots or viral dialogues.

In that sense, Hussain is articulating a fatigue many viewers across the region feel. Whether Bollywood chooses to listen is another story.