Pakistani 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.
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Deol, whose latest 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?) — before adding, “Aapke dilo tak” (All the way to your hearts). Provocative? Perhaps not for 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 Dharmendra’s anti-war project — which focused on the human cost of conflict rather than chest-thumping nationalism.
Hussain’s remark strikes a nerve because it reflects a wider unease 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 trades 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 the questions Hussain alluded to. In recent years, several of Hindi cinema’s biggest earners — from Gadar 2 to Dhurandhar — have relied on simplified binaries of hero and enemy, where Pakistanis become convenient antagonists, stripped of context, complexity or humanity.
Hussain isn’t arguing that war films shouldn’t be made. Rather, he suggests they shouldn’t exist solely to affirm national pride or political narratives. Anti-war cinema doesn’t dilute patriotism; it interrogates it. It forces audiences to confront loss, grief and moral ambiguity — themes that don’t lend themselves easily to slow-motion action shots or viral dialogue.
In that sense, Hussain is giving voice to a fatigue many viewers across the region quietly share. Whether Bollywood chooses to listen is another story.
