BOLLYWOOD is predictable; emotions, music, patriotism, villain, repeat. But now and then, Indian alt-cinema breaks through the noise and delivers razor-sharp content. Paatal Lok, a crime thriller on Amazon Prime Video, is one example. It isn’t just a thriller but a masterclass in decoding the machinery of power, propaganda, and manufactured enemies.
In Paatal Lok, the assassination plot isn’t really about murder. It’s about getting rid of four petty criminals the political elite want out of the way. So they invent a fake plan to kill a journalist who was never in danger, just useful as a name on paper.
The police are tipped off before anything happens, swoop in for a dramatic arrest, and the headlines write themselves: ‘Delhi Police foils plot to kill journalist’. The criminals disappear into the system. The government walks away looking brave. And no one asks why any of it happened in the first place.
The plan falls apart when a low-ranking Delhi cop starts asking the wrong questions and uncovering links that go too close to those in power. The case is quickly taken from him and handed to the CBI, which makes sure it leads nowhere. Their fix is simple: plant some evidence, change the story, and suddenly those four petty criminals are no longer small-time thugs but dangerous Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists backed by Pakistan’s ISI. Just like that, the truth is buried, and the headlines are taken care of.
But the real twist? The journalist in question, whose career, otherwise, was in a downward spiral towards irrelevance, is now draped in the tricolour. Thumping his chest on primetime, telling tales of bravery and how he ‘survived’ an assassination attempt by the intel agency, he becomes the “voice of India” and the new wheeler-and-dealer of the media industry.
If all of this sounds eerily familiar, you aren’t alone.
The media circus around the Pahalgam attack felt like a clumsy sequel to Paatal Lok, except this time, it wasn’t fiction. What the show satirised, Indian news channels turned into a strategy. Instead of grief and accountability, the tragedy became fuel for a nationalist spectacle.
Reckless anchors took centre stage, repackaging loss as war, while social media algorithms did the rest by amplifying outrage over truth. It unfolded like a script we’d already seen, only louder, uglier, and real.
When war sells and rage trends, the loudest lie often outperforms the quiet truth.
As someone who studies the political economy of disinformation, I was repeatedly asked the same question by various news outlets covering the story: ‘Why were the Indian news channels broadcasting obviously false news? Weren’t they worried about their credibility?’ It’s a fair question for media outlets that still rank credibility over clicks.
But sadly, for a large section of news media on either side of the border, especially on the Indian side, credibility isn’t the currency anymore; attention is. In the age of algorithmic amplification, virality, not verification, is rewarded by the business models. When war sells and rage trends, the loudest lie often outperforms the quiet truth.
You’re probably wondering, what’s this new ‘business model’? Let me break it down.
Broadcast news outlets in India, much like everywhere else, aren’t speaking to TV audiences anymore; they’re feeding the beast that lives online, the trolls, the echo chambers, the meme pages that turn warmongering into viral gold.
In India, the sheer scale of its news and entertainment industry has made this transformation especially brutal, where competition has become a fight for survival. And what better place to cash upon the currency of hate than the social media platforms infested with incel networks, political trolls, hate-mongers, disinformation peddlers, and religious bigots.
According to a recent joint publication by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and Ernst & Young (the FICCI-EY report), digital media now accounts for 32 per cent of India’s entertainment sector, making it the single largest revenue stream. In other words, the clicks, shares, and rage-fuelled engagement online aren’t just noise, they’re profit.
Thus, in a media market where digital platforms now drive the biggest chunk of revenue, ethics and credibility have long become irrelevant. So, the media outlets invent, distort and dramatise, not because they’re misinformed, but because they know exactly what their audience wants: rage, revenge, and a constant supply of enemies. Contrary to the belief that credibility is essential for journalism, this audience doesn’t care. The more sensational the content, the more they come back for it.
But that’s only the tip of the figurative iceberg. As the brilliant Dr King Schultz put it in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, “I see the puppet, but I don’t see the master.” We see the anchors screaming, spinning hateful narratives, and cashing in on the rage. But we never think about where we see them, do we? The real money is in the shadows. It’s the social media platforms pulling the strings. Their algorithms are pumping this poison into billions of timelines and feeds across the world, making billions from rage; profiting on a scale the puppets can only dream of.
But the trail doesn’t end here. Behind the platforms lurk the political demagogues who are less the audience and more the directors of this spectacle. They aren’t just reaping the benefits of hate and polarisation; they’re scripting the very narratives that fuel it. The TV anchors echo them, the platforms amplify them, but the blueprint, the raw hate, the manufactured threat, the nationalistic hysteria starts in the halls of power. This isn’t accidental, it’s the design.
Prima facie, this playbook seems to benefit all parties involved, but in the long run, the cost is monumental. Outrage feeds demand, and demand feeds more outrage, until citizens become fanatics and viewers become war-mongers.
Night after night, this cycle breeds mass psychosis: a public so agitated that calm feels unnatural. While this may serve Modi’s political machine by fuelling pride and silencing dissent, it can’t be controlled forever. The media and platforms may think they’re directing the rage, but eventually, the spectacle turns, and the anger finds new targets, sometimes close to home.
The writer is the founder of Media Matters for Democracy.
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2025
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