Vivek Agnihotri, the writer-director, has told us a Hate Story. The Kashmir Files, a revisionist docudrama that depicts the sad departure of Kashmiri Pandits from their country in the 1990s, is fundamentally a fight of narratives, with Agnihotri firmly siding with one version of events. It promotes an alternative viewpoint on the Kashmir conflict, using some facts, half-truths, and plenty of distortions, with the goal of not only provoking, but inflaming.
The Kashmiri Pandits’ suffering is real, and it deserves to be reflected in popular culture, but it demanded a more nuanced, objective perspective than Agnithotri’s ‘we vs. them’ worldview. The film is based on the testimonies of people who have been scarred by the insurgency in Kashmir for generations, and portrays the tragic exodus as a full-scale genocide, akin to the Holocaust, that was kept hidden from the rest of India by the media, the ‘intellectual’ lobby, and the government of the day for their own vested interests. Agnihotri has expanded on his approach in The Tashkent Files, in which he conveyed his perspective on former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death through memories and flashbacks, with the narrative shifting back and forth in time.
Krishna (Darshan Kumar), a Kashmiri Pandit and student at a prestigious institution modelled after Jawaharlal Nehru University, is persuaded by his ‘liberal’ teacher Radhika Menon (Pallavi Joshi) that the secessionist movement in Kashmir is comparable to India’s Freedom Movement.
When Krishna’s grandfather Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher) dies, he returns to Kashmir with his ashes and encounters four of his grandfather’s friends, who tell Krishna and the audience the “true” story of Kashmir. According to their story, Kashmir was at the crossroads of civilisations, and the Pandits were allowed to die by the state and the federal government in order to please one community. Bitta, the film’s villain, appears to be a mix of real-life Ghulam Mohammad Dar alias Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, the two faces of the militant group Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front.
Unlike the films of Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Agnihotri has no time for romance in the Valley. It’s more of a rebuttal to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, in which the film tries to argue that Kashmiri Muslims deserved to suffer as a result of what they did to Pandits and other minorities.
It’s a disconcerting take that grabs and gripes at different times. Bloodshed, torture, and otherisation of Pandits have all been depicted in graphic detail. The camerawork captures the Valley’s dark, sombre tones, and the performances are riveting.
Kher is at his most bombastic as the film’s conscience keeper. Darshan is a revelation, and it’s great to have Pallavi return. As Pushkar Nath’s buddies, Mithun Chakraborty, Prakash Belawadi, Puneet Issar, and Atul Shrivastava sound credible.
The film, which accuses the international press of exploiting planned upheaval and clickbait headlines, eventually succumbs to the same alleged exploitative ways to reach out to tear ducts and generate hostility. There is almost no attempt to comprehend what happens when a majority becomes a minority, and vice versa. The moderate Muslim’s voice is notable by its absence. The portrayal of the educated elite is superficial, bordering on simple character assassination at the end.
Some of the scenes promise that Agnihotri will approach the subject’s complexity in a way that hasn’t been done before, but once he starts peddling an anti-religious agenda, The Kashmir Files loses its objective, humanistic lens. It treats the period with the same selective treatment that it criticises the players of in the 1990s.
Agnihotri, like most people in the age of social media, sees the past through the lens of today, and a lot of what happens at dinner tables makes it to the screenplay. There is no middle ground for him, since he cherry-picks events from the past to fit his story. He mentions Sheikh Abdullah, but omits Raja Hari Singh’s participation in the accession of Kashmir to India. He also avoids discussing how, in the late 1980s, a manipulated ballot gave door to a bullet culture in Kashmir.
The video downplays the Pakistan-Afghanistan connection, instead blaming the insurgency on local Muslims. Terror has a religion, according to Agnihotri’s data, and it appears that every Muslim in Kashmir has been a separatist eager to convert Hindus to Islam. The Dogra Kings’ control over the state until 1947 is not covered in this course.
Religious slogans were raised, and Kashmir Pandits were caught in the crossfire between India and Pakistan, but history is not as black and white as Agnihotri would have us believe. In history books and oral tradition, the names of Kashmiri legends and their contributions, which Krishna invokes in the climactic speech, are well-known. If the filmmakers met them while conducting research for the film, it would be unfair to claim that they were not told about the mystic Lalleshwari, Shankaracharya’s journey to Kashmir, or Kashmir’s intellectual capital.
When it comes to selective facts, the film directly attacks Farooq Abdullah and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and indirectly blames Congress for the exodus, but conveniently forgets to mention that the National Front government was in power in January 1990, when the alleged genocide occurred, and whose survival was reliant on outside support. He has conveniently forgotten that the party whose agenda he’s knowingly or unconsciously promoting formed the government with one of the regional parties described in the movie as nationalist in Delhi and communalist in Srinagar.
Surprisingly, the film mentions justice but ignores the role of the judiciary, the Pandit legal battle, and the fact that the actual Bitta spent more than two decades in prison and is now back behind bars after being released on bail.
Even the beautiful old poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz is not spared in the attempt to twist. Hum Dekhenge, written in 1979, employs traditional Islamic imagery as a metaphor to subvert and oppose Pakistani General Zia Ul Haq’s extremist interpretation. The poet comes near to Hinduism’s Advaita philosophy when he states “An-al-Haq” (I am truth). Previous Prime Ministers, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are implicitly mocked in the film for attempting to capture people’s hearts. Perhaps the creators believe that just the landmass should be ruled.
One thinks that, in the spirit of street justice, the film’s clips may soon show up on social media, fuelling more hatred against one group.

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  Kashmir 370

Dr Mudasir Ahmad Gori