Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh.

In 2023, the Indian director Honey Trehan was about to achieve a breakthrough. His film Punjab ’95, which told the story of a human rights activist murdered for investigating mass killings of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, had been given a prominent slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trehan was convinced the film would be big; its star, Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh, believed in the project so much that he didn’t even ask for a salary.

• The recent censorship of the Indian film Satluj has drawn new attention to the way that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attacked free expression in Bollywood.

• Over the course of more than a decade in power, Modi has used a mix of punishment and incentives to push the massive industry away from producing themes that challenge his government – and turned propaganda films into box office successes.

• There’s a lesson here for the United States. Though protections for free speech in Hollywood are far more robust, Trump has made several moves that resemble Modi’s — suggesting that Americans need to be vigilant about protecting free speech here.

But the premiere never happened. According to Trehan, his producer got a threatening call from someone affiliated with the Indian government, saying that if the film screened in Toronto, it would never appear at home. Trehan and his producer agreed, but the approval never came. India’s ratings agency, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), demanded 127 cuts — including the removal of the word “Punjab” from a film about the state. If implemented, they would have left the film, in Trehan’s words, as little more than a “trailer.”

After years of court cases and failed wrangling, Trehan and his producer gave up on a theatrical release. They signed an agreement with Zee5, an Indian streaming service, to premiere the film exclusively on their platform in July under the new name Satluj.

But just two days after the film’s release on July 3, Zee5 removed Satluj for Indian viewers at the request of the government, which claimed the film threatened public order and national security. This weekend, it was removed from Zee5’s international service as well, meaning the film was no longer legally accessible anywhere on the planet.

When we spoke on Monday, Trehan was still unsure why the government had gone to such extraordinary lengths to suppress his film. He claims to have heard nothing beyond vague public claims about the film threatening public safety and Indian sovereignty. But it’s clear that the events have rocked his faith in his country.

“When all these kinds of things happen,” he says, “you are bound to ask this question to yourself: Are we still living in a democracy?”

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the Indian film industry — which has a cultural footprint that rivals Hollywood and even surpasses it in some regions — has undergone a transformation. Once considered a bastion of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, the kind of business where Muslims and even Pakistanis could be stars, the Indian film industry has increasingly been remade in its right-wing government’s image. Films that celebrate Hindus and demonise Muslims now make up an ever-growing share of industry output, while films that take on politically difficult topics, like Satluj, are becoming scarcer.

Producer Honey Trehan attends the premiere of A Death in the Gunj at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2016. Ernesto Di Stefano Photography/Getty Images

This outcome is by design. As part of its broader assault on democratic freedoms, the Modi government has taken a series of very visible steps to reward ideologically simpatico filmmakers — and to punish dissidents. The industry has understood this and adjusted its output accordingly. Those filmmakers willing to speak publicly, like Trehan, describe a widespread climate of self-censorship, painting a portrait of an industry that has chosen compliance over courage.

“There are so many things I want to make and I get told, ‘No one will touch it,’” the Indian director Shruti Ganguly tells me. “Actors who speak out against the government — they don’t get work.”

Understanding how this happened matters to Indians — but not only them. The Trump administration has, in several ways, laid the groundwork for a similar attack on cinematic free speech. While the American version is vastly less developed than what’s happening in India, the subordination of Bollywood has exposed the general means through which a powerful and seemingly liberal entertainment industry can be brought to heel by a determined government.

In today’s America, “you can see an early stage of what happened to allow institutions to be captured and politicised” in India,” says Sadanand Dhume, an expert on Indian politics at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

Censorship in Indian film is hardly new. The CBFC, created in 1951, is empowered not just to rate movies but to block their release outright if it finds a film contrary to any of the sweeping categories in Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act: the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency, or morality.

It is a power that certainly had been abused prior to Modi’s premiership. Aman Bhargava, a data scientist based in Bangalore, recently examined data on over 8,000 Indian films censored by the CBFC between its founding and the end of the 20th century. His investigation found extremely high levels of censorship in the board’s first three decades, focusing primarily on depictions of sex and violence. But political censorship was hardly unheard of. During the Emergency, a two-year period from 1975 to 1977 where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed essentially dictatorial powers, censors literally burnt the prints of a film satirising her leadership.

“So many filmmakers have their films stuck. But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

— Honey Trehan, director

By the 1990s, instances of CBFC censorship had declined dramatically. Modi has not only revived it but also significantly expanded its scope — creating a new censorial regime even worse than what came before. “The past was problematic. The present is worse,” Dhume says.

This judgement is backed by extensive evidence, published in both the Indian and American press, demonstrating the government’s increasingly tight grip over Hindi-language filmmaking.

The most obvious mechanism has been the politicisation of the CBFC. The current chair — a poet named Prasoon Joshi — is a vocal ally of the prime minister; in a phone call, the Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi described him as a government “stooge.” Trehan, similarly, says the body is working closely with Modi’s Ministry of Information to control the narrative on politically sensitive topics.

Over time, the Modi government has moved to remove checks on its allies’ power. In 2021, it eliminated a decades-old special appellate board that allowed filmmakers to contest CBFC rulings — forcing them instead to go through regular litigation for relief. But India’s justice system is slow and expensive, often an unrealistic option for movies that need to make their budgets back in a timely fashion. Trehan’s Satluj shows how difficult it is to fight the censor and why so few in Bollywood are willing to do it.

“Over the past decade, the CBFC has become less a certifying body and more an arm of state-sponsored and sentiment-driven censorship,” journalist Saurav Das wrote last year in Frontline, an English-language Indian magazine published by The Hindu newspaper. “With every decision, every inexplicable demand for cuts, and every instance of folded resistance in the face of fringe protests, the Board has revealed what it truly is: a morality police in disguise.”

Nor is the CBFC Modi’s only weapon. “The tax authority,” Dhume says, “is basically completely politicised in India” — and can be wielded against filmmakers and studios that step out of line. So can the police: Five years ago, Indian police arrested the son of Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan on drug charges. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for Khan’s outspokenness on violence against Muslims. Khan’s son was detained for three weeks and released on bail; prosecutors dropped the charges seven months after his arrest, ultimately admitting he had never possessed drugs in the first place.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses party workers after an election win at BJP headquarters in New Delhi on May 4, 2026.

Hardik Chhabra/India Today Group/Getty Images

Modi’s BJP party also has something no prior Indian government possessed: a fervent online cadre that directs waves of threats and harassment at dissident directors, actors, and even film critics. In January 2021, a Muslim supporting actor in an Amazon-hosted streaming show called Tandav — a soapy political drama that took shots at life under the BJP — became deluged by online hate. Angry Modi fans repeatedly reported him to the police for alleged insults to Hinduism; Amazon eventually cut one of his scenes to try and appease the mob.

But the Modi government hasn’t been satisfied with only punishing critical filmmakers. It has also provided ample incentives to studios who wish to make ideological propaganda.

This began with 2022’s The Kashmir Files, a movie about the very real killings of Hindus in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which exaggerated the scope and severity of the situation to demonise Muslims. Widely panned by critics as dishonest shlock, the film received a huge promotional push from the ruling party. Modi personally endorsed it, and at least eight BJP-governed states gave it a special exemption from entertainment taxes to lower ticket prices. BJP states also gave government employees time off from work to go see the film and even hosted screenings. As a result, it was one of the best-performing movies of the year.

The success of The Kashmir Files showed that there was a real audience for aggressively nationalist films — which makes sense in a country that has elected Modi to the premiership three times and where he currently enjoys a roughly 70 per cent approval rating. As such, it has spawned more sophisticated imitators.

In 2025, a film called Dhurandhar — a slick action movie about an Indian sleeper agent killing his way through mafia and terror networks in Pakistan — dominated the box office, becoming the third-highest-grossing Hindi film of all time. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge premiered this year and is more nakedly propagandistic: Variety’s reviewer wrote that it “practically features Modi as a supporting character through endless news snippets.” It has already surpassed the box office total of its predecessor.

The end result is a kind of profit-minded self-censorship. Increasingly, Indian film studios shy away from financing movies with controversial themes and shovel money at jingoistic fare like Dhurandhar. An 11-month investigation by the Indian publication Article 14 concluded that the situation has effectively transformed the most prominent sector of the Indian film industry.

“Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry,” Article 14’s Anna M M Vetticad writes.

To be clear: It’s not that critical voices in the film industry have been silenced entirely. Independent-minded films still get made — like 2023’s Jawan and Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan-led action films that The Atlantic described as “littered with subversive commentary on India under Modi.” The environment is markedly freer outside Hindi-language cinema; the Malayam and Tamil film industries have been more resistant to government pressure.

Shah Rukh Khan speaks on stage during a panel at the 2025 Joy Forum at SEF Arena on October 17, 2025, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Amal Alhasan/Getty Images for GEA

But the Hindi industry is the biggest and most influential: The term “Bollywood” itself generally refers only to Hindi studios. And it’s clear that the balance is off there, with the government’s anti-Muslim narrative dominating one of India’s most important cultural spheres.

“So many filmmakers have their films stuck,” Trehan says. “But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

What Modi has done to Indian film carries clear lessons for other backsliding democracies — most notably, the United States.

The first lesson is that free expression in major industries depends, in large part, on preserving nonpartisan leadership and norms in powerful government agencies.

India’s CBFC, tax agencies, and law enforcement have long had problems, including abusive political interventions. But Modi has made these problems considerably worse, to the point where it is less a change in degree than in kind. Today, key agencies have become staffed by political cronies who act like extensions of ruling parties. This capture of nominally nonpartisan institutions enabled him to bring so much political pressure to bear on studios, producers, and actors.

The second lesson is that big cultural industries — whatever their professed political values — are primarily profit-seeking entities. Bollywood has a reputation as a more culturally progressive space, even casting Pakistani actors in prominent roles during the early Modi years. When it became clear that the government held the balance of financial power, Indian film studios shifted their focus, knowing that critical films might never be released while propagandistic ones would be profitable.

“Movie-making is an expensive business, so you understand where they’re coming from.” Dhume says. One film critic, granted anonymity by Indian journalist Kaashif Hajee, was even blunter: “The only God is the box office.”

We have seen both of these mechanisms at work in the second Trump administration.

President Donald Trump has famously demolished the independence of agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission and even tried to weaponise them against its enemies in the entertainment industry — most notably when it tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this year.

Brendan Carr, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, on March 27, 2026.

That effort failed. But there are also many examples of American conglomerates seeming to bow to government pressure, like CBS’s decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show while its parent company awaited FCC approval for its merger.

There’s even a handful of examples of studios pushing out films that nakedly bid for the president’s favour, like Amazon’s Melania documentary. While that film was a box office dud — making just $16.7 million on a $75 million budget — it was widely seen as an effort to win favour with the administration on other regulatory matters. Ted Hope, one of the founders of Amazon’s studio arm, called the film “an outright bribe” in an interview with the New York Times.

Overall, however, these cases remain exceptional. There is no evidence that the American entertainment industry is shifting toward MAGA propaganda in any mass way; Trump-critical fare (like the Star Wars series Andor or the superhero satire The Boys) remains vastly more popular with critics and audiences.

This owes partly to structural dissimilarities between the United States and India. The American ratings board has long been far weaker than the CBFC, and the First Amendment is far stronger than India’s constitutional speech protections. We are less than two years into Trump’s second term; Modi has been in power continuously since 2014. It would be very surprising to do in a year and a half what Modi accomplished over a decade.

The lesson of India’s film industry is not, then, that Trump is on the verge of conquering Hollywood. Rather, it’s that he has identified the right mechanisms for pressuring the entertainment industry: using politicised agencies to both raise the costs of free speech and create incentives for companies to toe a state-friendly line.

That these lines of attack are at present underdeveloped in the United States does not mean they could not, eventually, become something more serious. Any effort to future-proof American democracy, to safeguard its foundations from further assault, requires serious study of how these tactics worked in places like India and identifying means of blocking them.

“The situation with a film like Satluj…is a warning call — not just for Indians, but for other countries around the world when it comes to how governments are going to control the creative business,” Ganguly says.

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