The Kashmir Files: Cynical Exploitation of Human Suffering to Spread Communal Hate

Vivek Agnihotri’s latest film ‘The Kashmir Files’ released on 11 March, the day after the Assembly election results were announced in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur, has created a storm across the country especially in North India.

Before we discuss anything about the film, there are two facts that merit our attention. Firstly, the film is being aggressively promoted by the Modi government and the RSS-BJP establishment. Modi himself has endorsed the film and targeted its critics even as BJP-led state governments are granting special leave to government employees who can show that they have bought tickets to the film and in many places BJP leaders are making logistical arrangements for viewers.

The second disturbing thing about the film is that screenings are being used by Hindu-supremacist campaigners to generate a hate-filled frenzy, at times within the precincts of cinema halls, calling for violence against Muslims including forcing Muslim women to marry Hindu men and produce Hindu children. In other words, cinema halls screening the film have started looking like hate factories.

In the name of showing the ‘truth’ of Kashmir, this is precisely what the film intends to do – weaponising the trauma of Kashmiri Pandits three decades ago to fuel the Sangh brigade’s anti-Muslim hate campaign in today’s India. The film contains graphic scenes of Kashmiri Pandits being butchered and driven away from the valley. The terms it uses are genocide and exodus, and the figures it suggests are way above the numbers previously mentioned by any sources including organisations of Kashmiri Pandits, RSS publications and government replies in Parliament.

More than anomalies of facts and figures, the film misrepresents the entire context of the Kashmir problem. Kashmir was never known for communal violence - Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs shared the common culture of Kashmir, and were proud of their common identity of Kashmiriyat. When militancy erupted in Kashmir in the late 1980s, following the hanging of separatist leader Maqbul Butt and massive electoral farce, it targeted the Indian establishment and government institutions, and Kashmiri Muslims found themselves as much at risk as Kashmiri Pandits, and every account of Kashmir corroborates this fundamental fact of the Kashmir tragedy.

The film portrays the entire Muslim community in Kashmir as being complicit in the violence against Kashmiri Pandits while reports from the valley and many reminiscences and testimonials by Kashmiri Pandits themselves, both who fled and those who have stayed on, acknowledged how many Kashmiri Muslims actually risked and sacrificed their own lives to protect their Hindu neighbours. The portrayal of extreme violence, shockingly passed by the censor board, is designed to vitiate the viewers’ minds with anti-Muslim fears and hate.

If the film really wanted to highlight the trauma of the Kashmiri Pandits and seek justice for the community, it should have asked the basic question that human rights activists in the Valley, democratic commentators on Kashmir, as well as Kashmiri Pandits themselves continue to ask: why the community has not been resettled in all these thirty years despite the BJP, which has been seeking votes in the name of Kashmiri Pandits and is now cynically exploiting the trauma through this film, being in power for much of the post-1990 period both at the Centre and even in the state? Why have documents relating to the violence against both Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims in the 1990s been suppressed by the state? In fact, when the tragedy happened we had the VP Singh government at the Centre which had the backing of the BJP and Jagmohan as the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir who went on to become a BJP MP and union minister in Vajpayee’s cabinet, and the BJP was then completely preoccupied with its Ram Mandir campaign.

Even as displaced Kashmiri Pandits are still awaiting justice and their return to the Valley, Kashmiri Muslims have been subjected to untold suffering and humiliation in their own homeland at the hands of the state, including mass disappearances, killings and secret burials in mass graves, torture and rape. While the film appears to deride even the Vajpayee era attempts at solving the Kashmir problem, it keeps absolutely quiet about the virtual military rule unleashed by the Modi government since the abrogation of Article 370 and conversion of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories. The film does not ask questions of the government, either of the time or of today, its political agenda revolves around vilifying Farooq Abdullah and the National Conference, creating a clamour for the hanging of Yasin Malik (in the film his character is conflated with that of the notorious Bitta Karate) much like Afzal Guru whose hanging was ordered by the apex court in the name of satisfying the ‘collective conscience’ and using the Kashmiri Pandit issue to target JNU, the Left student movement and human rights campaigners.

In the version of the film released in India, JNU has been named ANU (to avoid legal complications as admitted by Vivek Agnihotri himself), and the film uses the image of JNU manufactured by the BJP IT Cell as an ideological hub of brainwashed students who seek to break India into pieces. The film actually creates a displaced Kashmiri Pandit student character who has lost his parents and is brought up by his grandfather in Delhi. The grandfather never tells him that his parents were actually killed in Kashmir, attributing their death to an accident, and in the university he is ‘brainwashed’ by his Leftwing teacher about the militarisation of Kashmir. On the grandfather’s death, the young man goes to Kashmir to discover the Agnihotri version of what actually happened and comes back a changed person to expose his teacher and change the opinions of his fellow ‘brainwashed’ students.

The history of Nazi Germany tells us how films were central to fascist propaganda and mobilisation. Leni Riefenstahl's state-funded documentaries Triumph of the Will, about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympia, about the Berlin Olympics of 1936, were classic propaganda films that spread the fascist message of German superiority and anti-Semitism.  The Sangh brigade has always worked on the Goebbelsian principle of repeating lies endlessly and effectively and now with Vivek Agnihotri and his Kashmir Files, which is bound to become a blueprint for more propaganda films to follow, the fascists in India seem to have taken their next step in hate-filled murderous propaganda after the Godi Media and IT Cell invasion of mainstream and social media world.

They have been using the Kashmiri Pandit issue for three decades as a propaganda prop to harvest votes, now this campaign is being used to incite genocidal violence. We cannot but remember that two years ago, the ‘Goli Maro’ slogan chanted by influential BJP leaders from public rallies and processions, actually led to firing of shots at students and the large-scale anti-Muslim communal violence that followed. The forces of peace and justice, truth and reconciliation, must act concertedly to save India from the ominous BJP propaganda campaign over The Kashmir Files. Justice for Kashmiri Pandits cannot be divorced from justice for Kashmiri Muslims; and those who weaponise the pain of the Pandits for communal propaganda against Muslims aim only to distort truth and deny justice.