Alpha and what YRF thinks about geopolitics

(The studio's spy universe keeps casting India and Pakistan as a family divided by a few bad men. The trouble is that the real subcontinent has stopped believing in that story.)

A poster from the promotions of the film Alpha headlined by Alia Bhatt and produced by YRF.

I went to see Alpha because I am an Alia Bhatt fan, and I admired, again, the fact that Hindi cinema’s most bankable female star keeps pushing the boundaries to the extent that she can.

But watching the film was instructive in another critical way – it gave me a deeper insight into what the world of Yashraj Films (YRF) thinks about geopolitics.

That may sound like a heavy load to place on a summer action film but popular cinema is rarely only entertainment. Beneath the stunts and the standoff missiles, every one of these spy films is quietly making an argument about how the world works. And to hear that argument clearly, you have to go back to where Yash Raj Films itself comes from.

Yash Chopra, who founded the studio in 1970, was born in Lahore in 1932. He was a boy of the undivided Punjab, and Partition took his city from him. He never quite got over it, and spoke of Lahore for the rest of his life with the ache of a man describing a beloved he was not allowed to marry. That ache became the emotional operating system of an entire film studio.

You can see it most emotionally in Veer-Zaara (2004), Chopra's great late romance, in which an Indian and a Pakistani love each other across the border and across decades, kept apart not by any real difference between them but by the cruelty of history and the small men who enforce it. The film's underlying claim is unmistakable and deeply moving: that Indians and Pakistanis are not two peoples but one people, a single family arbitrarily cut in half, and that the wound is a quarrel among kin rather than a rupture between civilisations.

This is not an incidental sentiment at YRF. It is the studio's theology. And, remarkably, it survives even when the studio stops making love stories and starts making war.

And in this, Yashraj is not alone. This was the worldview of many people who were foundational in the creation of what we today call Bollywood including some of its greatest luminaries, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, Vinod Khanna, Dev Anand, the father of Shahrukh Khan, they all trace their roots to parts of what is now Pakistan (Peshawar, Gurdaspur, Lyallpur and others).

This has given Hindi cinema one of its enduring sentiments (backed by the fact that the movies have often been commercially popular on both sides of the border)

Consider the Spy Universe itself. Ek Tha Tiger (2012) is a romance between an Indian RAW agent and a Pakistani ISI agent - the two intelligence services that are supposed to be at each other's throats, folded into a love affair. Tiger Zinda Hai (2017) has RAW and ISI operatives set aside their rivalry to jointly rescue hostages from a common enemy. In War and in Pathaan, the true villain turns out to be not Pakistan but a rogue Indian - a former agent gone bad. And now in Alpha, Alia Bhatt plays a super-soldier raised as a weapon by a rogue commander running an illicit military programme; the enemy, once again, is not a nation or a people but an aberrant individual, a warmonger who manufactures killers, whom our heroine must destroy to reclaim her stolen humanity and her lost family.

Notice the pattern. Across a dozen years and seven films, YRF keeps locating the source of conflict in the same place: a handful of bad men. Take away the rogue commander, the corrupted agent, the fanatic who has hijacked the system, and - the films imply - ordinary people on both sides would simply get along. The soldiers would rather not fight. The spies would rather be friends. The lovers would rather love.

There is a name for this worldview, and it is one of the oldest and most humane traditions in the study of international politics. Scholars call it liberal idealism, or liberal internationalism - the conviction that beneath our flags we are all fundamentally human, and that contact, commerce, reason and affection can dissolve enmity between nations. Its lineage is distinguished. Immanuel Kant sketched it in Perpetual Peace (1795). The English writer Norman Angell argued in The Great Illusion (1910) that the economies of Europe had grown so interdependent that war between them had become irrational and self-defeating. In our own time, political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye described a world of "complex interdependence" in which trade and connection blunt the appetite for war.

The sharpest way to put YRF's position, though, comes from Kenneth Waltz, whose 1959 classic Man, the State, and War offered three "images," or levels, at which one can look for the causes of conflict: in human nature and individuals; in the internal character of states; and in the structure of the international system itself. Yash Raj Films is pure first-image cinema. For YRF, war lives in the hearts of particular men, and so peace is a matter of reaching those hearts. Fix the individual - redeem the assassin, expose the rogue, let the lovers meet - and the world heals.

It is a beautiful idea. It is also, in the world of 2026, an increasingly lonely one.

Against the idealists stand the realists, and they have spent a century patiently explaining why good feeling is not enough. War, they argue, does not live mainly in the first image — in the hearts of bad men — but in the third: in the structure of an anarchic states-system that has no world government above it, in which every state must ultimately provide for its own security and can never be entirely certain of its neighbour's intentions. Hans Morgenthau built the modern realist canon on this insight in Politics Among Nations (1948); Waltz himself later turned to structure in Theory of International Politics (1979); and John Mearsheimer pushed the logic to its bleak conclusion in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001).

Even a thoroughly benign state, the realists point out, can menace others simply by arming to defend itself - the predicament the scholar John Herz named the "security dilemma," where one side's shield looks to the other like a sword. Centuries ago, Thucydides had already recorded the harsh grammar of it: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Norman Angell is the cautionary ghost in this story. Having demonstrated, more or less correctly, that a European war would be economically ruinous and irrational, he watched 1914 arrive anyway. Interdependence did not stop it. Sentiment is not structure, and structure does not care what the lovers want.

And here is the thing the YRF universe cannot absorb: the actual subcontinent has, in the past year, walked decisively away from the family-quarrel story. On 22 April 2025, gunmen murdered 26 civilians at Pahalgam, singling out victims by their religion. In response, between 6 and 10 May, India launched Operation Sindoor - missile and drone strikes on terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the first time Indian forces had struck across the international boundary since 1971. It escalated into a four-day exchange between two nuclear-armed states, the first genuine drone war of the subcontinent, halted only by a ceasefire. India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and declared, in the Prime Minister's phrase, a "new normal" in which terror and talks could no longer coexist.

Whatever one thinks of any of this, and reasonable people argue fiercely about it, it is plainly not the world of Veer-Zaara. It is the world of doctrine, deterrence, red lines and calibrated force: the realist's world, not the idealist's. The men who run states on both sides are no longer behaving as estranged cousins who might be reconciled by a well-timed song. They are behaving as strategists inside a security dilemma, each convinced the other cannot be trusted, each preparing for the next round. You cannot rogue-commander your way out of that. The YRF diagnosis, that conflict is a malfunction caused by a few villains interrupting an otherwise natural peace, has become, however tender, a category error about how states and structures actually generate war.

There is a final irony here, and it is the richest one. In trying to imagine the subcontinent as one family, Yash Raj Films is not merely being sentimental — it is, without knowing it, practising a serious school of international relations theory. The constructivists, led by Alexander Wendt, argue that "anarchy is what states make of it": that whether two nations are friends or enemies is not fixed by nature but built out of shared ideas and identities. Cinema is one of the great identity-machines of any civilisation, and YRF has spent half a century trying to construct a common subcontinental "we." That is soft power in exactly the sense Joseph Nye intended - the power to attract, to shape what others come to want.

But constructivism cuts both ways. Identities can be built toward friendship - or hardened toward enmity - and the identity-work now under way across the subcontinent, on both sides of the border and among both publics, is running hard in the opposite direction from the Veer-Zaara dream. Samuel Huntington's pessimism about identity-driven conflict hovers over the region like weather. And the tell is small but devastating: when the crisis came, one of the first things to be severed was the cultural bridge itself — Pakistani artists scrubbed from Indian platforms, the very soft-power connective tissue YRF had spent decades weaving. The bridge snapped first. You cannot will a shared "we" into being from a Mumbai editing suite while the states-system, and the passions of two nations, are pulling the other way.

So what, in the end, does Alpha think about geopolitics? The same thing Yash Raj Films has always thought: that the real enemy is the war machine and the men who feed it, that even our weaponised selves secretly long to break free and find our lost family, and that peace is the natural condition which only villains disturb. It is a noble instinct, which is sometimes sold with real conviction, but the times are not right for this anymore.

The error is not in loving peace. The error is in believing that peace is the default that a few bad men interrupt - when the harder, sadder truth the realists offer is that peace, where it exists, is not the absence of villains but the disciplined management of permanent structural danger. It is patient, unromantic, doctrinal work, and it looks nothing like a love song.

Yash Chopra never stopped loving the city he lost, and out of that loss he built one of the loveliest things in Indian popular culture: a cinema of reconciliation that keeps insisting we are one people. But a tenderness born of one Partition cannot, by itself, dissolve the logic that produced it. The subcontinent YRF keeps dreaming is a Lahore of the heart. The one we actually live in is governed by the colder arithmetic of the states-system. Alpha is a fine reminder that we still want the dream — and, quite unintentionally, a reminder of just how far the world has walked away from it.

__(Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Global University.)