There is a scene in Naagin, Ekta Kapoor’s supernatural extravaganza on Colors TV, that deserves to be taught in every school of geopolitics, public health policy, and — above all — screenwriting. A professor specialising in eschatological theory (think Professor Jiang from Predictive History, but with a Hindutva software update), having assembled India’s finest sadhus, aghoris, and spiritual elders to address an impending pandemic, discovers that the usual method of summoning a divine serpent goddess isn’t working. The snake charmers have tried their best. Nothing. Then — read slowly — the professor reaches into his pocket, produces a handful of Indian soil, and throws it into the air. Vande Mataram begins to play. The Naagin, a snake-human hybrid, appears.

And here was I wondering — did the man have patriotic soil in his pocket the entire time? Like, just in case the science didn’t work?

This is the register at which Naagin — seven seasons, five hundred and twelve episodes, and lord knows how many kilogrammes of body glitter disguised as snake scales — operates. And in the year since the Pahalgam attack and the very confused military exchange that followed, it has become something more than entertainment. It has become therapy. Season 7, which continues to air at present, has become national, collective, prime-time therapy, delivered twice a week to audiences who need to know that, whatever happened on the actual battlefield, India’s mythological immune system remains fully operational.

The past two seasons have been particularly drenched in a vat of jingoistic storytelling where the biggest enemy of humanity is subtlety. Season 6, which aired in 2022 in the shadow of COVID and simmering China-India tensions, is where Naagin’s nationalist ambitions fully metastasised. It opens in a laboratory in a fictional country called “Chingistan” — a name The Quint‘s reviewer described as the writers having “used a common Indian slur and put ‘istan’ to it”. Not China. Not Cheen. Chingistan. To be fair, it does sound better than Pakina. Chingistan has been portrayed as a country with no value for life or morals, where human rights don’t exist, and anyone can be killed for the right price (cue the eyerolls). Scientists there prepare a liquid biological weapon to pour into India’s water supply on New Year’s Day 2020, in what the show presents as a thinly fictionalised account of COVID-19’s origins — though Chingistan’s scientists are more motivated than any epidemiologist has suggested, since India is, we are informed, their “biggest enemy”. The professor, having convened his council of saints (with Dr Fauci apparently not returning calls), determines that only the Sarvashresth Shesh Naagin — the supreme serpent goddess — can save the nation. He summons her with the soil. She appears, bows before an image of Bharat Maa, and receives her assignment: hunt down the twenty asurs (demons in disguise) that Chingistan has seeded into the Indian elite — its businessmen, its media figures, its politicians — all secretly working to destroy the country from inside its own drawing rooms.

Twenty. Embedded. Asurs. The pre-death monologues are their own art form. Before each is bitten, the Naagin delivers a speech of constitutionally protected length: “Tu asur hai, tu desh ko bech raha, jis desh ka khaaya ussi ke saath gaddari karta hai, desh ka drohi hai tu deshdrohi” — You are a demon, you have sold the country, betrayed the very nation that gave you everything, you are a traitor, a traitor to the nation! Another character’s father confessed — “Main hi hoon vo deshdrohi jo desh ko bech raha hai” (“I am the traitor who has sold this nation!”) — approximately ten times in fifteen minutes. The fifth asur turns out to be the heroine’s own father. His motivation? The nation gave him nothing. A fan replied with the season’s finest line: “Arre bhai, Chingistan mein Naagin biwi nahi milti, sirf Hindustan mein milti hai” — In Chingistan you don’t get a Naagin wife. Only in India. The nation has, in fact, given you quite a lot.

Here is where the show stops being merely ridiculous and becomes something worth taking seriously. The asur device is not just a plot mechanism — it is a political instruction manual. By embedding the enemy inside respectable Indian society, Naagin tells its audience that the threat is not only foreign but domestic: in the boardroom, in the newsroom, in the family home. Any deviation from the Naagin’s particular brand of sacred Hindu patriotism is, within the show’s logic, potential evidence of demonic infiltration. Dissent becomes suspicion. Nuance becomes treason. The show doesn’t need to say “Muslim” or “Pakistani” — the asur label, applied to those who have “eaten the nation’s salt” and repaid it with betrayal, does the work with a vocabulary Indian audiences have been trained, across decades of political rhetoric, to decode instantly. This is Islamophobia and xenophobia operating not through slurs but through mythology, which is considerably more durable and considerably harder to challenge.

Naagin 7 premiered in December 2025, seven months after Operation Sindoor and the ceasefire that India’s information ecosystem preferred not to examine too closely. The opening episode is set at the Mahakumbh, a major religious festival, because if you are going to fictionalise national anxiety, aim for scale. The Amarnath Yatra train is threatened. And standing between India and complete destruction, is Anantha, the Shesh Naagin.

However, Parmeet — the antagonist of the show — and his acolytes have a secret weapon of their own, one they have buried deep underground: a dragon. Portrayed as the ‘natural enemy’ of the naagin, this choice is geopolitically perfect. The writers of Naagin, known for their “subtlety-meets-trainwreck’ style, have crafted a supernatural proxy war where the Hindu sacred feminine overcomes Chinese imperial ambition, one episode at a time, on what looks like a partially crowd-funded budget based on the visual effects. On a VFX budget that undersells the actual Rafale debate, Naagin 7 stages the supernatural version of the military standoff India couldn’t quite conclude — and furnishes it with a satisfying ending. The dragon loses. The nation is safe. Run credits.

Operation Sindoor was many things for India, but “conclusive” wasn’t quite one of them. The ceasefire arrived fast. The narrative war continued longer and murkier. Naagin understood, with its customary animal instinct, that a gap needed filling. It doesn’t claim to be about Pakistan, or China, or the uncomfortable distance between the press briefings and the satellite imagery. It says it’s about a serpent goddess defeating a dragon at the Kumbh Mela.

The audience — enormous, and not remotely stupid — knows exactly what it means. The soil goes in the pocket. Vande Mataram swells. For forty-three minutes, India wins cleanly, without a ceasefire, without ambiguity, and without the inconvenience of facts.

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Usman Azeem is an Islamabad-based journalist and researcher specialising in media narratives on conflict.