Rehman Dakait has become the unexpected breakout figure of Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar, with Akshaye Khanna’s menacing performance eclipsing even Ranveer Singh’s lead role in the eyes of many viewers. Social media is overflowing with reels, quotes and memes celebrating the character, especially the now-viral line, “Rehman dakait ki di hui maut badi kasainuma hoti hai.” Yet those who knew Karachi’s underworld, including SSP Chaudhry Aslam’s widow Noreen Aslam, argue that the larger-than-life image of Rehman is exaggerated. She insists that while he committed horrific crimes, he wielded influence only within a limited area of Lyari and was nowhere near as powerful as the film suggests.
Rehman Dakait, born in 1975 to gangster Mohammed Dadal, entered the world of crime shockingly early. At 13, he stabbed someone for the first time. At 19, he strangled his mother and staged her hanging after accusing her of an affair — a murder that marked the beginning of his notoriety. Over the years, he became one of Karachi’s most feared criminals and ruled Lyari alongside his cousin Uzair Baloch. Reports claim he made Baloch kick severed heads like footballs as a display of dominance. Between 2001 and 2009, his gang was at the centre of Lyari’s bloodiest years, until a government crackdown culminated in a police shootout in August 2009 that killed him at age 34. Uzair Baloch assumed leadership after his death.
Dhurandhar draws heavily from these real events, blending fact and fiction to construct a gritty spy thriller set in Pakistan’s gang-ridden underbelly. If Rehman represents one extreme of Karachi’s violence, Chaudhry Aslam represents the other. The encounter specialist survived countless assassination attempts before being killed in 2014. Noreen recalls one such narrow escape: he suddenly asked her to leave their home, and only months later did she learn that their location had been traced and a blast occurred just minutes after they left.
Noreen has publicly expressed discomfort with certain phrases used to describe her husband in the film, such as “son of the devil” and “jinn,” which she says are disrespectful to both Aslam and his mother. She also shared that Aslam had admired Sanjay Dutt since watching Khalnayak in the 1990s and believed he would portray him with justice and intensity.
Dhurandhar features an ensemble cast including Sanjay Dutt, Arjun Rampal and R. Madhavan, and has crossed ₹100 crore globally in its opening weekend thanks to strong word-of-mouth. Akshaye Khanna’s portrayal of a fictionalised Rehman dominates large portions of the narrative, while the plot follows Ranveer Singh’s character Hamza, an undercover Indian agent who infiltrates the gangster’s inner circle to relay intelligence and ultimately bring him down.
