‘The Kashmir Files’: An Appalling Display Of Majoritarian Paranoia

The need for stories, they say is at the crux of human survival and requires a fulfilling, if not greater, then equal as hunger and thirst, for it is stories that rise above physical confines to gratify the deprivations of the soul. Storytelling, if rightly done, is the art of bringing together a diverse audience to laugh, cry, enrage, emote and react as one unified body, displaying its immeasurable power to hold the reigns over the cognitive abilities of masses. Hence, goes the old saying, “Those who tell the stories rule the world”. Bollywood with its delusions of grandeur is one such industry that has been doling out its tales of secret twins, rebirths, miraculous survivals, love-at-first-sight, choreographed confessions and pompous universities bordering on the implausible, in the guise of reflecting the Indian society. These stories have been hungrily devoured by a cinema addicted populace as the holy grail of realism for decades now. People claim the magic of Bollywood with its larger-than-life sets lies in its ability to transport them from their own grim realities to a world of possibilities, fiction, romance and triumph. Even its many biopics and retellings with disclaimers reading, ‘based on true events have failed to do away with its unnecessary fixation with melodrama and monologues that would seem too far-fetched in the real scenario.

One such recent retelling of Bollywood which has caused quite a stir, some say awakening is ‘The Kashmir Files’, by filmmaker Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, which claims to unveil some ‘hidden truths’ of the Kashmiri Pandits exodus of 1990. Though why Mr. Agnihotri feels the facts of the exodus were ‘hidden’ is unclear.  Anyone interested in its history only had to read about it or search for it on Google, to have the ‘files’ bare in front of him from the very first link itself. The movie has evoked a whirlpool of emotions in its viewers, with many leaving the cinema halls in solemn silence, teary-eyed and unable to shake off the riveting experience that held them in its grip for nearly three hours. Promoted merely by word-of-mouth and statements by none less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, the movie has witnessed historic reactions by even labourers, rickshaw pullers, auto-drivers and paan sellers offering free services in exchange for a promise to watch the movie. It has received the full support of the Indian right-wing who released it tax-free in more than ten states, granted leave to its police officers to watch it and is even proposing to screen it in the legislative assembly for MLAs. Large Indian flags were waved, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, ‘Pakistan murdabad’ and many other slogans have been raised in theatres across the country including the call for the genocide of Indian Muslims and the impregnation of their women. The grand promotions of the movie only bring to mind quite vividly, the snubbing that movies based on the Gujarat riots of 2002 ‘Parzania’ and ‘Firaaq’, had received. (Both were banned in right-wing states and had performed poorly at the box office.)

Why is ‘The Kashmir Files’ being endorsed by the current regime? While the reasons are many the one that glares above them all is the hard to accept fact that the Indian Hindu population is an audience that has been waiting hungrily for one, however small reason to stand up against its Muslim brethren and align in the open with their masters of saffron and gore. Ask them now of their blatant calls for genocide, their rising up in arms, their eyes lighting up at the mention of rape, their support of an unconstitutional verdict depriving Muslims of their rights and they will say to you, ‘Didn’t you watch ‘The Kashmir Files’? This is only a fitting revenge.’ While the exodus (yes that is exactly what it was, an exodus) of the Kashmiri Pandits at the hands of extremist militants was indeed a regretful chapter of Kashmir’s history, ‘The Kashmir Files’ with its suspicious timing and intent is guilty not only of igniting hatred and Islamophobia in its viewers but also of distorting historical facts, defaming citizens, scholars, politicians, martyrs and prestigious institutions and maligning an entire community as murderers.

The movie, to begin with, is set in two periods, 1990 and 2016 and is a story of a conflicted Kashmiri Pandit, Krishna who, unaware of the bloodshed that took his family’s life and home, is all set to participate in a university student body election in support of the liberation of Kashmir, though why the Kashmir issue is relevant in a student body election is uncertain. When his displaced, scholarly grandfather played by Anupam Kher dies, Krishna visits Kashmir for the first time to fulfil his grandfather’s dying request of spreading his ashes at their ancestral home and finds out the supposed truth. In its 170-minutes runtime, the movie is generously sprinkled with classic BJP ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ rhetoric and innuendos inciting hatred against the Muslims of the country. That the Pandit exodus was masterminded by Pakistani militants, hijacking mosques and running amok in the streets of Kashmir is a fact that many Kashmiri Pandits have testified to and have given acknowledgements of how civilian Muslims sheltered them against the atrocities, made safe passage for them, protected their homes in their absence and will still welcome them back. Sunil Pandita, Rakesh Tickoo and Shaadilal Pandita, in their interview to the BBC, recall how the calls for exodus blaring from mosques were given by militants and not the civilian Muslim population, whose existence was equally threatened had they extended support to any Hindu in the valley. The Kashmiri Pandits, now residing in Jammu condemn the movie for furthering the divide that the insurgency had wrought between the two communities of Kashmir and threatening the safety of the Pandit families that remained behind. They claim the movie is just the government’s attempt like always to use the Kashmir issue as tissue paper that can be discarded until the next elections.

Yet, the movie shows a black-and-white representation of murderer-Muslims and pious-Pandits with not a single dignified Muslim character. It goes on in fact to show more than 20 instances of villainous, stereotypical Bollywood-style, kohl-rimmed-eyes Muslims as the enemies of Hindus. There’s a fruit vendor using Pakistani currency in India, a close-knit, trusted neighbor guiding militants to the exact hideout of his Pandit friend, a lecherous Muslim scholar, a maulvi sahab overtly demanding sexual favours, the then Chief Minister of Kashmir hosting militants in his house, a man announcing that Muslims doctors would not treat Hindu patients because that is what Allah has commanded (he repeats that dialogue thrice for effect or maybe to ensure it has lodged itself permanently in the memory of its viewers), tiny weapon-wielding children propagating hate and demanding the Pandits to leave, Muslims lying about the support they gave the Pandits, women snatching away rations meant for the Pandits, holy shrines being the flashpoints of anti-Hindu protests,  and so many more such illustrations with no historically documented evidence, that solidify the idea that Muslims are a community that should forever be viewed with mistrust for the backstabbing connivers that they could be. Agnihotri’s camera lingers lovingly on many occasions on dark supposedly, Kashmiri Pandit blood slowly, very slowly trickling through the snowy valley, almost as if it is demanding that it be avenged even if it is by ordinary citizens through lawless means. The Nandimarg Massacre of 2003 depicted in the movie shows 23 Pandits lined up to be killed immortalizing the expressions of each of those 23 characters forever in the minds of the audience as they fall, slowly, one by one, in a ditch after being elatedly shot by armed Muslim men, ending with the shooting of a young boy on whose bloodied face the camera freezes and remains that way for a few long minutes, beseeching the audience, lest they forget. Not to mention, the ditch is shown surrounded by Muslim spectators of men, women and children remorselessly witnessing the massacre. 

The movie corrects the word exodus to genocide in almost every conversation to reiterate that what happened was no exodus and claims to know better than the Kashmiri Pandits themselves. Since the events itself did not meet the requirements of genocide, Mr Agnihotri himself has exaggerated its depictions to convince people that it indeed was. According to Wikipedia, 80 Kashmiri Pandits were killed by the insurgents by mid-March 1990 when the exodus was largely complete, and according to another scholarly report 388 if the deaths of officials are included. The protagonist defends this count in the movie by saying the true numbers never came out because the media never let it happen. But Mr Sanjay Tickoo, a resident Kashmiri Pandit, an obvious well-wisher, who now heads the Kashmiri Pandit Sangarash Samiti, an organisation that looks after the affairs of the Pandits who remain in Kashmir, in his statement to Al Jazeera, given in 2011, says, that 399 Pandits were killed up till 2008. In Mr Tickoo’s words, “The figures of 3,000 to 4,000 killings is propaganda, which we reject.” In any case, Mr Agnihotri’s ‘lakhon ke log’ (millions of people) hype is a gross miscalculation. In his interview Mr Tickoo also speaks respectfully of his Muslim neighbours and friends who congregated at his house, to apologize for a threatening letter he had received and urged him not to leave. Mr Agnihotri, since he boasts of the extensive research that the film required (700 testimonies or so) only had to visit Kashmir to speak to those who actually saw the tragedy and remain there to tell the tale. He could have also extended his efforts and researched some more examples of genocides even if only to draw parallels to his claims. The only example he manages to give is of the genocide of Jews at the hands of Nazis in Hitler’s Germany. Its death toll? Approximately six million. Hence, a genocide. The ethnic cleansing of Rohingyan Muslims is a recognized genocide with approximately 25,000 people dead, 116,000 beaten, and 36,000 thrown into fires. Closer home, the Gujarat Riots of 2002 with more than 2500 dead, 223 missing, and 2,500 injured in a mere month, is a genocide that he has conveniently overlooked. He also fails to mention the many Muslim casualties from the same period and even beyond. While 219 Pandits were killed in Kashmir from 1989 to 2004 according to former Revenue Minister Raman Bhalla, Srinagar, Central Public Information Officer in the Police Headquarter, Kashmir, reveals that in the period from 1990 to 2021, a total of 1,724 people had been killed by militants in the state. Of this, 89 were Kashmiri Pandits, while the remaining 1,635 had ‘other faiths.’ P.P Kapoor the RTI activist who sought this information said that the figures showed that a majority of those killed in the Valley since the start of militancy in 1990 were Muslims.

In an interview with The Lallantop, Vivek Agnihotri responds to the Muslim casualties’ question by saying, “Though the genocide of Jews was carried out by Germans, many Germans were killed in World War II, but that doesn’t mean that their killings should be documented and mentioned in a movie about the genocide itself.” It may not make sense to mention two separate incidents in the same context but Mr Agnihotri quite skillfully evades the question as to why he fails to mention the other ethnic groups killed in the same incidents. While there’s an elaborate picturization of the Nandimarg Massacre of 2003 that killed 23 Kashmiri Pandits, there’s convenient amnesia in his film of the Sopore Massacre of 1993 that took the lives of 43 Kashmiri Muslims at the hands of the Indian Border Security Forces and the Kunan Poshspora night when 150 Kashmiri Muslim women were raped and 200 men tortured in a raid by the CRPF and BSF.

Krishna, the protagonist in his long, boisterous monologue at the end of the movie revives for those listening (watching in theatres?) the history of Kashmiri Muslims as invaders who stole the peace of the quiet Kashmir that the Pandits had chosen for their scholarly pursuits. He mentions a Shams-ud-din Araqi and attributes supposed forced conversions of Hindus and atrocities by Muslims to his name but he seems like he has never been told (just like he was naively unaware of the history of his own parents) of the 100-year Dogra regime of the Maharajahs, whose state officials were the Kashmiri Brahmins, who were ”individually gentle and intelligent, as a body they were cruel and oppressive.” He isn’t very informed it seems of the time in Kashmir’s history where Muslims were non-existent in the State’s civil administration and were barred from officer positions in the military. During a famine in Kashmir between 1877-9 when the population of Srinagar had been reduced to half, not a single Pandit had died of starvation. The office of Prime Minister, then held by a Kashmiri Pandit, Wazir Punnu, is said to have declared that there ”was no real distress and that he wished that no Musulman might be left alive from Srinagar to Rambhan (in Jammu).”Forced to migrate, the Muslims had returned to find their lands taken over by the Pandits claiming it to be waste, uncultivated land. He fails to mention that the 1891 Census Report shows 1,11,775 Muslims had migrated to Punjab to escape the torture of the Pandits in influential positions. He doesn’t mention the king Ghiyas-ud-Din Zain-ul-Abidin, who introduced the grant of stipends to the learned Brahmans who had converted to Islam and was so heavily influenced by the 1% Pandit population of Kashmir that he banned the killing of fish, eating meat on several days and cow slaughter in their respect. The infamous ration scene of the movie, which has no evidence whatsoever, somehow could not manage to remind its makers of that time in history when Kashmiri Pandit officials would exclude the names of deserving Muslims from the rations list to enumerate high ranking officials who did not need them. There are many things he fails to mention, probably owing to the movie’s prolonged screen time, if not for which surely Mr Agnihotri would have brought the ‘truth’ out before everybody in this grand monologue of Kashmir’s bloody history.

But the ‘truth of Kashmir’ doesn’t lie just in its history. It is not a bunch of secret ‘files’ inaccessible to the people seeking it. Mr Agnihotri or anybody aiming to film it will not have to dig too deep. If only he had candidly shot even one scene of present-day Kashmir, his camera and subsequently the viewers would never miss the daunting presence of the Indian Army in the valley, revealing the truth of Kashmir: a picturesque valley seized and kept under lock and key with ruthless mercenaries as watchdogs. The atrocities over Kashmiri Muslims continue even as I write and are well documented. A team of three women from the National Federation of Indian Women, visiting a dark, internet free Kashmir between September 17 and 21, 2019, 43 days under siege after the abrogation of Article 370, have detailed stories of unspeakable horrors unleashed upon the valley by the ‘guarding’ Indian Army with nearly 13000 young boys lifted in those 43 days alone. 

These horrors remain the primary reason why the Pandits refuse to return to the valley and not the vandalism of their properties as shown in the movie. Unlike the claims of the movie the Pandits aren’t still wasting away in camps, but have been successfully moved into proper houses, most of it under Congress regimes. A now resilient, educated, well-connected community, the Pandit refugees have jobs and are spread across India and the world. Would a Kashmiri Pandit refugee’s son or daughter working in a corporate job in Mumbai want to return to the family home in the old city of turbulent, uncertain Srinagar with no equivalent job? While the movie shows vandalized homes as having seen the wrath of Muslim violence, it forgets to mention that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has occupied 737 premises in Jammu and Kashmir including homes of Kashmiri Pandits, temples, cinema halls, hospitals and hotels as reported by News18. Quoting CRPF Director General Kuldiep Singh, the report said that the armed forces personnel will vacate premises owned by Kashmiri Pandits if the families ask them to.

Regardless of the generous amount of misinformation coated with scattered facts presented in the movie, what is most shocking is the reception that the Indian audience has given it. An appalling display of the majoritarian paranoia, the movie has unified all classes alike in their hatred and calls for extermination. Only until a few years ago, it seemed like the Indian filmgoers were a responsible, and rational audience that called a spade a spade and was not such easy prey for those at the helm of manipulating propaganda. But the past few years have possibly lulled their minds into a deep slumber to dream of a utopian Hindu rashtra that protects their rights and plummets them to become the superpowers of the world. The question that begs to be posed is, why then are there no ‘well-intended’ movies on the unending Dalit atrocities of the country where a person from a backward caste faces crimes every 10 minutes; a total of 50,291 cases registered in 2020 and a 9.4% increase from the previous year. Do the lives of the Hindu lower caste matter so little when compared to the pain of its elite upper-caste Brahmins? Aren’t lives lost just lives lost at the end of it all, or do they need to be measured by the Hindu mythological standards? So then, when it is finished with its atrocities of non-Hindu minorities, will the Right-wing include the lower castes in its dream of the ‘greater good’ or are they to languish in their predestined lives of muck and dirty waters?

The chain of events that the movie, as intended has set in motion is now beyond control. The reactions are alarming. The hate is spine-chilling and their calls for annihilation, are foreboding. But the most poignant of these was a video posted on Mr Anupam Kher’s social media handle of his mother vouching for the truth of the movie. She insists that each word of the movie is true and needs to be retold verbatim. When referring to the Muslims she says, ‘Jis thaali mein khaate hain usi mein ched daalte hain.’ (Punch holes in the plate in which they eat). Mrs Kher doesn’t realize that had 95% of Kashmir’s population stood up in arms against the 5% Pandit population, hardly anyone would have survived. Yet, 808 Kashmiri Pandit families still reside in the valley today, quite harmoniously. ‘In my many visits to Kashmir, I never found my identity as a Kashmiri Pandit any hindrance in interacting with the Muslims. There is not a single Kashmiri Muslim who is not guilt-ridden at what happened to our community during that traumatic period between 1988 and 1990,’ writes Vivek Raina, a Kashmiri Pandit settled in Delhi. But his weak voice drowns out in this war of narratives, as Mr Anupam Kher calls it in the movie, amongst the loud, deafening calls coming out of theatres, propagating revenge, hate and calling it a time for the ‘Hindu awakening’. 

The Kashmiri Pandit exodus, carried out by armed militants, supported by Pakistan, ignored by the Indian government, and used by subsequent governments as an election mandate is a remorseful part of Indian history much like the Partition, events in Gujarat, Godhra, Delhi, Assam and Bengal, but to use it as a tool to incite more violence that could far outnumber the statistics of the exodus itself is a deed in need of condemning. ‘The Kashmir Files’ has indeed become a textbook example of Nazi Joseph Goebbels’ law of propaganda which says “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, exhibiting the true power of storytelling: to commandeer, like puppets, a naïve population into a war that they have no knowledge of.