Cinema has never merely reflected political life; it has functioned as one of its most efficient laboratories. From its earliest mass forms, cinema has been a technology for organising affect, disciplining perception, and training populations to recognise themselves as “a people”. To ask whether films respond to public conscience or actively shape it is therefore to misrecognise their historical function. Cinema operates dialectically: it draws upon pre-existing anxieties and resentments, but reorganises them into a moral and emotional grammar through which power becomes sensible, violence becomes ethical, and domination becomes common sense.What distinguishes cinema from other ideological forms, however, is not simply its capacity to persuade, but its capacity to prepare – to create affective conditions under which violence becomes statistically predictable without ever being explicitly instructed. In this sense, cinema must be understood not only as an ideological apparatus but as a stochastic infrastructure: a cultural technology that increases the probability of violence by unaffiliated individuals through repetition, saturation, and moral cueing, while preserving plausible deniability for its producers.Representative image of a camera. Photo: Mohamed_Hassan /Pixabay.Stochastic terrorism operates precisely in this register. It does not issue commands or coordinate action. Instead, it repeatedly identifies target populations as dangerous, culpable, or historically guilty; frames violence against them as defensive, restorative, or overdue; and floods the public sphere with narratives that lower moral inhibition. No single film causes an attack. Yet across time, the outcome becomes predictable. Violence appears spontaneous, individualised, and aberrational – while being structurally produced.Cinema is uniquely suited to this function. It does not argue, it interpellates. It does not explain, it teaches bodies how to feel – whom to mourn, whom to fear, whom to disregard, and whom to kill. Through spectacle, rhythm, repetition, and identification, cinema converts abstract antagonisms into visceral certainties. It does not tell the spectator what to think; it trains the spectator in how violence should feel when it arrives.Also read: ‘Dhurandhar’: Aditya Dhar’s Spy Saga Is as Subtle as a TrollThis is not a new political capacity. It was demonstrated with extraordinary clarity in the early twentieth century by two films that made explicit what cinema could do when yoked to reactionary power: D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). These films did not merely endorse racism or fascism; they manufactured “the people” as an affective body – humiliated, purified, exalted – and rendered violence not only legitimate but redemptive. Griffith transformed white grievance into historical injury and vigilante terror into moral restoration; Riefenstahl sublimated mass submission into aesthetic transcendence. In both cases, cinema produced a population primed for violence without ever needing to order it.Post 2014, Hindi cinema, operating in the garb of “nationalism,” inherits this lineage – not through imitation, but through homologous political work. At the centre of this cinematic project stands a familiar figure: the forgotten man. Much like the Fordist white male worker in post-industrial America – recast as the bearer of the lost glory of rural white America and mobilised as the affective core of Trumpian populism, the upper-caste Hindu male in contemporary India emerges as its structural equivalent. Neoliberal capitalism has eroded secure employment and social mobility; Mandal politics and Dalit assertion have unsettled inherited caste hierarchies; feminist movements have challenged patriarchal authority in the home and workplace. Yet cinema does not name these as structural processes. Instead, it condenses diffuse anxiety into a single master affect: emasculation.The upper-caste Hindu male, standing in for the Hindu nation and its civilisational self-image, emerges not as economically precarious or socially privileged, but as historically humiliated, restrained by law, mocked by elites, and dishonoured by minorities. This humiliation is then narrativised as civilisational injury. Courts are slow, media hostile, institutions compromised, bureaucracy corrupt. The state appears weak, procedural, effeminate. This is the affective terrain on which Hindutva cinema operates.File photo: Muslims offer namaz in Kolkata. Photo: PTI.Through exaggerated violence, sexualised historical memory, and gendered vengeance, cinema produces an affective economy in which contemporary Indian Muslims – especially Muslim and Kashmiri men – appear not simply as political adversaries or social minorities, but as repositories of historical guilt. Violence against them is framed as rectification rather than aggression, as justice rather than cruelty. Crucially, this violence is almost never demanded explicitly. It is permitted affectively.Overt propaganda fails not simply because it is crude, but because it collapses plausible deniability. It forces the spectator to confront his own ideological investment too directly. Explicit hate films leave no room for moral self-exculpation; they compel the viewer to see himself as hateful, and in doing so alienate precisely the audience they seek to mobilise. By contrast, post-2014 Hindi cinema preserves the spectator’s self-image as reasonable, informed, and morally intact. The viewer is never asked to admit hatred – only anger. Not prejudice – only injury. Not aggression – only defence. “I do not hate Muslims,” the spectator can plausibly say, “I am angry because of Pakistan, Kashmir, history, terrorism.” Violence is never framed as desire; it is framed as reluctant necessity, as realism, as response to facts.This is the psychological hinge on which stochastic violence turns. The subject must be able to say: I am not a bad person. Crude propaganda demands belief and therefore exposes ideology. Affective cinema demands only recognition. It allows the spectator to experience himself not as ideological but as perceptive; not as radicalised but as awake to uncomfortable truths. The frequent invocation of “based on true events,” the incorporation of documentary footage, and the figure of the restrained, professional protagonist all function to reinforce this moral alibi. Propaganda is for fools; the viewer is too intelligent for that. What he sees on screen is not fabrication but truth with exaggeration, not hatred but honesty.Stochastic violence depends precisely on this configuration. The probability of violence rises not because a command has been issued, but because moral restraint has been quietly delegitimised. When violence later erupts – through vigilantism, harassment, or everyday hostility – it does not appear as violence at all. It appears as reaction, as defence, as belated justice. Cinema has already done the work of preparing this distinction.Representational image of a cinema hall. Photo: Sabine Lange/Pixabay.The films examined in this essay – ranging from historical epics to contemporary nationalist thrillers – do not instruct viewers to kill, expel, or assault. What they do instead is far more consequential. They repeatedly depict Muslim male bodies as predatory, excessive, treacherous, or killable; Hindu bodies as violated, patient, and morally superior; and state violence as both necessary and insufficient, thereby legitimising supplementary vigilante action. In doing so, they produce a cultural field in which violence becomes statistically inevitable even as responsibility remains diffuse.Hindi cinema can be assumed as a probabilistic technology of power – one that constructs “the people” as a moral collective while outsourcing violence to uncoordinated actors. Cinema here does not replace the state; it extends it. It does not command violence; it prepares subjects who no longer need to be commanded.Notably, from the early cinematic experiments in racial and fascist mobilisation to post-2014 Hindi cinema’s deployment of emasculation, gender, necropolitics, and historical myth, cinema has become the workshop where authoritarian desire is produced, normalised, and released into the social world. It is within this moral architecture – where violence appears as reluctant realism rather than hatred – that the following films must be read.Somatic humiliation and the probability of vengeance: ChhaavaIn Chhaava, stochastic preparation operates first and foremost at the level of the body. The film does not merely represent violence; it inscribes it somatically, producing a pedagogy of humiliation that works directly on the spectator’s sensorium. Hindu male bodies are captured, restrained, mutilated, mocked. The violence is exaggerated, grotesque, and insistently repetitive – far in excess of narrative necessity – because its function is not to advance plot but to train affect.A still from ‘Chhaava’. Photo: Screengrab from Youtube video.This is precisely where the opening theoretical claim about cinema as stochastic infrastructure becomes operative. The film never instructs the viewer to seek revenge against contemporary Muslims. It does something far more efficient. By collapsing historical defeat into bodily emasculation, it produces a felt equivalence between past and present: what happened to the Hindu warrior then is what happens to you now – through law, through minorities, through history itself.The probability of violence is increased not through ideological instruction but through affective permission. Once humiliation is naturalised as a civilisational condition, violence no longer appears as aggression but as rectification. The enemy need not be named explicitly in the present; the film has already done the work of moral cueing. When violence occurs elsewhere – on the street, in a lynching, in vigilante action—it appears spontaneous, individualised, and yet strangely appropriate. Chhaava thus functions as stochastic groundwork: it lowers the threshold at which violence feels justified, without ever demanding it.Sexualised history and the moral laundering of death: PadmaavatIf Chhaava prepares the ground through masculine emasculation, Padmaavat sanctifies that preparation by rerouting violence through the body of the Hindu woman. Here, the stochastic mechanism shifts registers – from humiliation to sexualised civilisational threat.The conflict in Padmaavat is not political in any substantive sense. It is eroticised, racialised, and moralised. Alauddin Khilji is not an imperial actor but a hyper-sexual Muslim male archetype – excessive, predatory, foreign. Padmavati, by contrast, is rendered as the symbolic core of Hindu civilisation: chaste, luminous, sovereign over her body. Historical myth is collapsed into allegory. Political conflict becomes the threat of sexual violence.A still from ‘Padmaavat’. Photo: Screengrab of video from Youtube.This move is central to the probabilistic logic of violence. Sexual threat is uniquely effective in producing moral certainty without instruction. The film does not need to say that Muslim men are dangerous in the present; it teaches the viewer to feel that danger as timeless. Jauhar then completes the moral circuit. The Hindu woman’s choice of death is framed not as tragedy but as sovereignty – an act that restores honour and redeems emasculated masculinity elsewhere.In stochastic terms, Padmaavat does not incite violence; it launders it. By making death appear ethical when routed through feminine sacrifice, it supplies the moral alibi that later violence will rely on. When Muslim bodies are attacked outside the cinematic frame, that violence is already pre-justified by a civilisational memory in which Hindu women’s bodies are eternally under threat and Muslim masculinity is eternally guilty. The probability of violence rises not because a command has been issued, but because restraint has been rendered immoral. Within this moral economy, Muslim women’s bodies – imagined as repositories of community honour – are discursively produced as legitimate sites of retributive violence, available to be disrobed, possessed, and symbolically conquered as spoils of a civilisational war that is repeatedly replayed as unfinished.Administrative killing and conditional belonging: Article 370Where Chhaava works through affective injury and Padmaavat through sexualised morality, Article 370 represents the final bureaucratic stabilization of stochastic violence. Here, the logic of killing is no longer mythic or somatic; it is procedural, technocratic, and routinised.The film situates Kashmir as a permanent zone of exception, where legality is suspended and violence is rendered administrative. Muslim and Kashmiri male bodies appear as objects of management rather than subjects of rights. What distinguishes Article 370 is not its explicit hostility, but its normalisation. Killing is not spectacular; it is efficient. Surveillance is not sinister; it is necessary. The emergency is not temporary; it is the baseline.A still from ‘Article 370’. Photo: Screengrab of video from Youtube.This is where stochastic terrorism completes its circuit. The film demonstrates that violence need not be emotional or enraged to be legitimate; it can be calm, managerial, even feminist in tone. The presence of a female Muslim protagonist – disciplined, patriotic, decisive – functions as ethical insulation for sovereign violence. If even she endorses suspension of law and the expendability of certain bodies, then violence appears fully normalised.Here, cinema does not merely increase the probability of vigilante violence; it aligns civilian intuition with state necropolitics. The spectator learns not just whom violence is for, but how violence should look when it is “responsible.” In such a moral field, the line between state action and civilian action blurs. The logic of killing has already been internalised.Documentary affect and the collapse of deniability: DhurandharWhat Dhurandhar does is to collapse the final barrier between cinematic preparation and political incitement, while retaining formal deniability. Unlike earlier films, it explicitly claims to be “based on true events,” and it does so not symbolically but materially – by splicing original footage of real terror attacks on India into its fictional narrative. Cinema here annexes the archive. Representation becomes reenactment.The montage is central. Real footage of Indian civilian suffering is intercut with frenzied, ecstatic reactions of Pakistani characters, while the Indian spy absorbs horror with stoic restraint. Terror, rage, and moral asymmetry are fused into a closed affective circuit: the enemy does not merely attack India; he rejoices in its pain. Pakistan functions as a stand-in civilisational subject, and the slide from Pakistani to Muslim to internal enemy is not subtle; it is engineered through affect.The choice of a Punjabi Hindu disguised as a Muslim spy is itself ideological pedagogy. Disguise teaches suspicion. Muslimness appears as surface, as mask, as hostile terrain that must be penetrated, surveilled, and destroyed. Threat is no longer external; it is already inside. The fantasy of the internal enemy is no longer allegorical – it is contemporary.Grotesque violence in Dhurandhar is paired with enemy ecstasy. Violence against India appears sadistic; violence by India appears tragic necessity. Restraint reads as weakness, empathy as suicide. The film never instructs viewers to act violently. It does something more dangerous: it teaches them how violence should feel, and whom it should be directed at; absence of retaliatory violence is nothing less than moral, physical, and cultural emasculation as the Pakistani characters deride India for being “soft” in its response to the 26/11 attack. Also read: 26 Scenes From 26 Years of Hindi Cinema Worth Remembering in 2026Any residual ambiguity is eliminated through dialogue. Madhavan’s character – deliberately resembling Ajit Doval – names the threat to the nation as arising from its “internal enemies”: a weak Congress government, an emasculating prime minister, a treacherous home minister, and an impenetrable network of Muslim butchers. Opposition politics, constitutional governance, and Muslim existence collapse into a single field of danger. Masculinity becomes the axis of sovereignty. Modi’s warmongering posture toward Pakistan is framed not as policy but as restorative virility, contrasted against the emasculated Hindu nation that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party (RSS–BJP) consistently invokes.At this point, deniability collapses in practice even as it survives in form. Dhurandhar does not merely increase the probability of violence; it renders violence common sense. The individual who assaults a Muslim neighbour, harasses an interfaith couple, or celebrates extrajudicial killing does not experience himself as radicalized. He experiences himself as already addressed – already morally prepared.Conclusion: Cinema as the workshop of stochastic violenceRead together, these films reveal a single infrastructure operating across registers. Chhaava inscribes humiliation into the male body. Padmaavat sexualises history to launder violence as virtue. Article 370 normalises killing as administration. Dhurandhar collapses fiction into reality and names the internal enemy.At no point is violence explicitly commanded. That is precisely the point. Cinema works through probability, not instruction. It saturates the cultural field with cues that lower moral inhibition, assigns guilt to identities rather than actions, and renders violence restorative rather than criminal. When violence erupts, it appears spontaneous and individualised – yet it is structurally produced.In this sense, Hindi cinema after 2014 does not merely construct “the people”. It constructs a probabilistic field of violence. Cinema becomes the workshop where authoritarian desire is produced, trained, released, and strategically disowned all at once – where subjects no longer need to be ordered to kill, because they already know whom violence is for.Anubhav Singh is a Dalit activist and a development professional working at the intersection of public policy and sociology.