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Friday, May 15
Global Free Speech

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump pose for a photo with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Mrs. Peng Liyuan. Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen For all of President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, he does have some consistencies, one being his love of a reviled ruler. He’s praised Vladimir Putin as a “genius” and “tough”. Kim Jong Un is an “absolute leader”, Viktor Orbán is “great” (or was – this may have since been revised). This may have since been revised. And despite all the heat around trade, Trump really likes Xi Jinping. Cancel that – he loves him, as he said at Davos in 2020. It’s obvious why. Xi is everything Trump aspires to be: the leader of a country with the most technologically advanced form of censorship, a nation of 1.125 billion internet users all behind a firewall and many, many surveillance cameras; a place where ethnic and religious minorities are locked up and human rights defenders jailed. Xi has managed to largely get away with it – the outrage today is frankly way too muted. China has even bought complicity from other countries. I should have been at the RightsCon event in Zambia last week which brings together leaders from around the world to talk about human rights and technology. Only, it was cancelled at the eleventh hour – Chinese state level interference apparently. Xi has spoken against “hostile forces” when it comes to the nation’s history, a handy excuse to stamp out anything or anyone painting the past unfavourably: it’s forbidden to mention the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in China. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which incidentally started 60 years ago this Saturday, are off limits. Even British colonial history in Hong Kong is a touchy subject, best forgotten. Xi expects journalists “to tell China’s story well”. The thoughts of Xi Jinping are studied and institutionalised. Posters of Xi have replaced deities in churches, temples and believers’ homes. As for his political rivals, he’s moved with ruthless precision to take them out. Zhang Youxia was the latest. And does anyone even remember Bo Xilai, still very much in jail? No Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has managed to accomplish such centralised control. Xi has censorship licked. Xi has power licked. And when his brazen ambition was laid bare back in 2018, when he abolished term rules so that he could stay at the top indefinitely and most of us in the world were appalled, Trump praised the move. “He’s now president for life. President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day,” he gushed. This is all grotesque. This is everything that Index exists to fight against. But this is the language that Trump speaks and this is the model that Trump wants. An economic powerhouse, a global leader, and ultimately a country that makes few concessions to freedoms. For every instance of Xi control listed above, you’ll find a counterpart coming out of the Trump administration. So what’s Trump doing in China? He’ll be talking trade, AI, Iran, fentanyl, sure. Maybe he’ll call for Jimmy Lai’s release, not because he necessarily cares about the imprisoned media mogul and certainly not because he cares about media freedom, but because consider the photo op! Consider the high of getting China’s most prized prisoner out! But I bet too that Trump will be taking note, observing up close the world’s largest and most successful autocracy and admiring the man who sits at the top. READ MORE

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President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump pose for a photo with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Mrs. Peng Liyuan. Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen For all of President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, he does have some consistencies, one being his love of a reviled ruler. He’s praised Vladimir Putin as a “genius” and “tough”. Kim Jong Un is an “absolute leader”, Viktor Orbán is “great” (or was – this may have since been revised). This may have since been revised. And despite all the heat around trade, Trump really likes Xi Jinping. Cancel that – he loves him, as he said at Davos in 2020. It’s obvious why. Xi is everything Trump aspires to be: the leader of a country with the most technologically advanced form of censorship, a nation of 1.125 billion internet users all behind a firewall and many, many surveillance cameras; a place where ethnic and religious minorities are locked up and human rights defenders jailed. Xi has managed to largely get away with it – the outrage today is frankly way too muted. China has even bought complicity from other countries. I should have been at the RightsCon event in Zambia last week which brings together leaders from around the world to talk about human rights and technology. Only, it was cancelled at the eleventh hour – Chinese state level interference apparently. Xi has spoken against “hostile forces” when it comes to the nation’s history, a handy excuse to stamp out anything or anyone painting the past unfavourably: it’s forbidden to mention the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in China. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which incidentally started 60 years ago this Saturday, are off limits. Even British colonial history in Hong Kong is a touchy subject, best forgotten. Xi expects journalists “to tell China’s story well”. The thoughts of Xi Jinping are studied and institutionalised. Posters of Xi have replaced deities in churches, temples and believers’ homes. As for his political rivals, he’s moved with ruthless precision to take them out. Zhang Youxia was the latest. And does anyone even remember Bo Xilai, still very much in jail? No Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has managed to accomplish such centralised control. Xi has censorship licked. Xi has power licked. And when his brazen ambition was laid bare back in 2018, when he abolished term rules so that he could stay at the top indefinitely and most of us in the world were appalled, Trump praised the move. “He’s now president for life. President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day,” he gushed. This is all grotesque. This is everything that Index exists to fight against. But this is the language that Trump speaks and this is the model that Trump wants. An economic powerhouse, a global leader, and ultimately a country that makes few concessions to freedoms. For every instance of Xi control listed above, you’ll find a counterpart coming out of the Trump administration. So what’s Trump doing in China? He’ll be talking trade, AI, Iran, fentanyl, sure. Maybe he’ll call for Jimmy Lai’s release, not because he necessarily cares about the imprisoned media mogul and certainly not because he cares about media freedom, but because consider the photo op! Consider the high of getting China’s most prized prisoner out! But I bet too that Trump will be taking note, observing up close the world’s largest and most successful autocracy and admiring the man who sits at the top. READ MORE

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For all of President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, he does have some consistencies, one being his love of a reviled ruler. He’s praised Vladimir Putin as a “genius” and “tough”. Kim Jong Un is an “absolute leader”, Viktor Orbán is “great” (or was – this may have since been revised). This may have since been revised. And despite all the heat around trade, Trump really likes Xi Jinping. Cancel that – he loves him, as he said at Davos in 2020.

It’s obvious why. Xi is everything Trump aspires to be: the leader of a country with the most technologically advanced form of censorship, a nation of 1.125 billion internet users all behind a firewall and many, many surveillance cameras; a place where ethnic and religious minorities are locked up and human rights defenders jailed. Xi has managed to largely get away with it – the outrage today is frankly way too muted. China has even bought complicity from other countries. I should have been at the RightsCon event in Zambia last week which brings together leaders from around the world to talk about human rights and technology. Only, it was cancelled at the eleventh hour – Chinese state level interference apparently.

Xi has spoken against “hostile forces” when it comes to the nation’s history, a handy excuse to stamp out anything or anyone painting the past unfavourably: it’s forbidden to mention the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in China. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which incidentally started 60 years ago this Saturday, are off limits. Even British colonial history in Hong Kong is a touchy subject, best forgotten. Xi expects journalists “to tell China’s story well”. The thoughts of Xi Jinping are studied and institutionalised. Posters of Xi have replaced deities in churches, temples and believers’ homes.

As for his political rivals, he’s moved with ruthless precision to take them out. Zhang Youxia was the latest. And does anyone even remember Bo Xilai, still very much in jail?

No Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has managed to accomplish such centralised control. Xi has censorship licked. Xi has power licked. And when his brazen ambition was laid bare back in 2018, when he abolished term rules so that he could stay at the top indefinitely and most of us in the world were appalled, Trump praised the move. “He’s now president for life. President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day,” he gushed.

This is all grotesque. This is everything that Index exists to fight against. But this is the language that Trump speaks and this is the model that Trump wants. An economic powerhouse, a global leader, and ultimately a country that makes few concessions to freedoms. For every instance of Xi control listed above, you’ll find a counterpart coming out of the Trump administration.

So what’s Trump doing in China? He’ll be talking trade, AI, Iran, fentanyl, sure. Maybe he’ll call for Jimmy Lai’s release, not because he necessarily cares about the imprisoned media mogul and certainly not because he cares about media freedom, but because consider the photo op! Consider the high of getting China’s most prized prisoner out! But I bet too that Trump will be taking note, observing up close the world’s largest and most successful autocracy and admiring the man who sits at the top.

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Global Free Speech

LEFT: Still from the film Dhurandhar which came out in India in 2025, directed by Aditya Dhar. Photo: COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL © B62 Studios – Benetone Films – Jio Studios/Alamy This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026.  Salim Mirza, played by one of India’s greatest actors, Balraj Sahni, stands on the wide platform of Agra railway station, as he waves goodbye to his sister and her children who are leaving for Karachi. India has been partitioned overnight but Mirza’s love for Agra, his home city, holds him back. He’s not like most of his fellow Muslims who are leaving en masse in search of a life they presume will be free from discrimination. As the story unfolds, Mirza’s small shoe manufacturing business endures spiralling losses, heightening his dilemma, but eventually Mirza decides to stay, braving the harsh realities of post-independence India. Garm Hawa (Scorching Winds), made in 1974, is one of the greatest Hindi films on Partition and the geo-politics of India and Pakistan. It was made on a shoestring budget and the director Mysore Shrinivas Sathyu borrowed three quarters of the money from his friends. In Garm Hawa, Karachi was positioned as a “land of hope” and Pakistan was not merely a land of barbaric violence. Though in reality Partition had caused enormous bloodshed on both sides of the border, resulting in the largest singular human displacement in the subcontinent’s history. Even at the time, the film struggled to be released, held back by the Censor Board which cited communal sensitivity. But Garm Hawa finally saw the light of day at the Cannes Film Festival the following year and received international recognition. The arguments for Garm Hawa’s subtle, heart-wrenching but humanist approach towards those troubled times after Partition are many. But what is most striking is the absence of hyper-nationalist discourse and “Islamophobia” from the public realm at the time. Interestingly, the term Islamophobia was only adopted later as sociological jargon. The portrayal of Muslims Hindi cinema has come a long way from the 1970s when a film could depict Muslims as real, honest people living ordinary lives and being forced to leave India for Pakistan. Now, cinema is showing Pakistan as a country of terrorists, crime, blood and gruesomeness with Karachi at the heart. The apogee of this trend is Dhurandhar which came out in 2025. The film is both a historic discourse and reflects the rise of hyper-nationalist cinema. It was a huge success at the box office, taking an extraordinary $160 million (13 billion rupees). The cinematic change hasn’t happened overnight, it is intertwined with India’s social transformation and compounded by ideology. A cursory search of films themed on India Pakistan relations throws up mostly espionage thrillers or military dramas. Some of the films were released as early as 1997, like Border set during the India-Pakistan war of 1971. In 2003, there was LOC: Kargil about the 1999 border war between India and Pakistan and the 2007 movie, 1971, was also about the Indo-Pak war. They are more nuanced in comparison with what is happening today and all came out a long time before the current batch of hyper-nationalistic cinema even got the wind in their sails; tellingly, a sequel to 1997’s Border was released on 23 January 2026. On the whole, the late 1990s films laid the groundwork for more definitive later works which showed Hindu heroism and Muslims as the enemy, like for instance The Kashmir Files, Uri The Surgical Strike, The Kerala Story, Raazi, Fighter or Gaddar 2. All are premised on the idea of “patriotism” and “bravery” as predominant emotions and they enjoy a Bollywood eco-system willing to back such projects. Patriotism is box-office gold In a typical chicken and egg scenario, a long list of producers are happy to fund money spinners. The latest “patriotic” films like Dhurandhar and Chhaava were among the highest-grossing films of the year. And as there is such massive demand for stories of Muslim “othering”, more films are getting made. Interestingly, the universe of propaganda films made in 2025 is varied, a period film, Chhaava is focused on Mughals and Marathas. Films like Sky Force and Tanvi The Great are political thrillers. Diplomat, another release, concentrates on Islamic terrorism while Sarzameen is an army thriller based in Kashmir. Dhurandhar, the most successful one of all, is significant because it shifts the film-making grammar of its predecessors and emerges as a gripping entertainer with upscaled cinematic techniques. Wickedly crafted, it is primarily a spy thriller, but it is also a gangster movie and a story of regional political conflict reflecting Pakistan’s internal politics. The genres are mixed together to churn out a brutally violent film, hitherto unseen in Hindi cinema. The screenplay deploys a smart structure with short segments leading from one to the other. This is mounted with a chartbusting techno Qawaali, (a form of Sufi devotional singing) originally used in the iconic 1960s superhit Barsaat. There are high velocity action shots either in extra close-up or from drone cameras. The film is set in the gory, trash-littered streets of a working-class neighbourhood of Karachi. And the characterisation is original. The lead character Hamza Ali Mazari (later unmasked as Indian army officer Jaskirat Singh Rangi), goes undercover as a member of Baloch mobster Rehman Dakait’s gang. Dakait is played by well-known and much-loved Bollywood actor Akshaye Khanna, Mazari by one of the highest paid younger generation actors Ranveer Singh. Dhurandhar appears to be a slick, edgy, hard-hitting movie not your typical hyper-nationalist puff. It speaks its language of bigotry differently, laced with codes of love-hate for the Muslim aesthetic, like its use of popular qawwali and ghazals (forms of music mostly associated with Islamic cultures), spliced with the portrayal of sado-masochistic Muslim men – and women – trying to break free from their “prison”. Younger audiences have lapped up Dhurandhar because they have already been weaned on the unsettling universe of Hollywood’s Kill Bill and Sin City. And the massive distribution network behind the film with 3,000 screenings worldwide, 390 in North America alone, has created a juggernaut guaranteeing the movie’s success. Such intertwinings are intricate and clever, a stark contrast to a handful of cinemas with small budgets but powered by a gritty resolve to tell a story rising from the very same geo-politics but which still manage to remain humane. Ikkis (meaning 21) was released in 2025 without much fanfare, while Dhurandhar was a crushing box office hit. Ikkis is a tenderly told true story of a young army man who died in the Indo-Pak war in 1971 and the events that follow next, when his octogenarian father travels to Lahore for a college reunion thirty years after his son’s death. No jingoism, no slogan-mongering, it casts a newcomer Agastya Nanda, together with the legendary actor Dharmendra who died a few days before the film’s release to pose some vital humanitarian questions connected to war. Ikkis was reportedly made with a budget of between $4.7 million and $7.1 million and was released on 1 January. The film was distributed by powerhouse brands – quite startling as one of them is also the distributor for Dhurandhar – yet it hasn’t been able to catch a break so far and has been a box office flop. The film got some love from a handful of audiences willing to argue for peace. So, it is much more conducive for propaganda films like Dhurandhar to be made (its sequel Dhurandhar 2 is ready for a March release). A polarised view of the world, where Pakistan and Muslims are baddies and Hindus and Indians are goodies, is driving enormous profits for Bollywood, so no wonder the movie moguls are not stopping. READ MORE

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