How Kashmir Files does both – peddles a lie and hides the truth.

The movie has done more to vilify the Kashmiri Muslims than being a voice to Pandits.

By Umar Sofi: 

“Peddling a lie is a sin but hiding the truth is much worse than this,” this is one of the dialogues in the much-debated Kashmir Files movie whose makers have done everything possible to do both – peddle lies and hide the truth.

Before I go into the intricacies of the movie which are filled with concoctions, constructions, and obvious exaggerations, it is pertinent to mention, for me as a Kashmiri, that whatever Pandits have endured cannot be discounted at all. It may be easier to die than to be displaced from one’s homeland.

Back to movie, there was a recent web series named Narcos on Netflix which is a biography of the famous narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar. Guilty of killing hundreds besides other major crimes, the cinematic narrative build-up is so strong, that a viewer starts to empathize with Pablo at the end of the series.

For those who have not watched it yet, be reminded, the critical approach to any content we consume, including Kashmir Files, is imperative. If we are not armed with knowledge about the subject we consume through a strong cinematic narrative, we become victims. Worse being we think of it as empowerment through awareness but it is pure manipulation.

About Kashmir Files, it is a very very long movie and painfully, it is too slow. The good thing about this is the wonderful acting done by Anupam Kher and Darshan Kumar who plays his grandson in the movie (spoiler alert). Their acting alone keeps the eyeballs stuck.

Now coming back to the notion that this movie stands for. It is supposed to document history but it has tried to construct it. It is supposed to highlight the suffering inflicted on Pandits but all it has done more to vilify the Kashmiri Muslim community in general.

Now, this does not hurt the mainstream audience from Indian metropolises but it does spark an enmity between two communities of Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits that have been trying to be hand in glove despite attempts to dismantle their unity. 

The movie starts with a procession of gun-wielding children through the alleys of Srinagar in the 1990s, aged 8 to 10 years old. Now with both international and national media exhaustively documenting Kashmir, recruitment of children shown as young in the movie into armed groups has never been established.

Mudasir Rashid Parray, 15, was killed in an encounter in December of 2018 in Srinagar Kashmir. He has been deemed to be the youngest militant ever roped in by the militant groups after the death of Burhan Wani. There have been no reports of mass child soldier recruitments as young as 8 or 9 ever in the history of the Kashmir conflict.

The portrayal of children en-masse into armed rebellion isn’t only deeply unsettling but somewhere it wrongly legitimizes that the Muslim community, in general, sought Pandits to vacate their homeland by arming their children to massacre them.

Also, here is an ethical catch, these children in the scene would barely understand that they were showcased as terrorists killing innocents.

Throughout the movie, the contemporary slogans that are reported from Kashmir after the 2010 shrine board agitation, have been shown as graffities painted on the walls of Pandit houses in the 1990s. I personally come from a town that still has hundreds of Pandit families who never left including my tutor’s family. This kind of literature has not been painted by the majority community on any Pandit house here, at least not in South Kashmir where most Pandits live.

There is a funnier tragedy too, the film very openly reveals how Islamophobia motivated its makers. In the beginning, a protest is shown with militants addressing a crowd. One of the militants is shown holding a placard that has a photo of Ayatullah Khomeini on it. Khomeini is a Shia spiritual leader and not even from Pakistan but Iran.

He has never been to Kashmir or has barely spoken about the conflict here, yet Agnihotri has shown him as a figure revered by Kashmiri militants. What better can be an opportunity to use a famous Muslim face that the global audience would relate to? Even if it makes no sense.

While this is all from the 1990s, the movie plot also runs parallel to current times, and during all that time it vilifies the left-leaning student organizations of India. The movie looks like the revenge that Agnihotri seems to have taken for all the criticism he got from JNUSU and AISA student union allies on Twitter.

From creating the character of professor Nivedita Menon and using the AISA flag by rebranding it as AIFA, Agnihotri’s attempts to denigrate the intellectual discourse in universities.

He has shown JNU which he calls “ANU” in the movie as a seat of seditious elements. In the movie, he shows professor Nivedeta Menon whom he has named Radhika Menon sloganeering “Burhan Wani (dreaded Hizbul militant) Zindabad.”

Almost all the speeches from JNU that I have come across of Menon, she has nowhere legitimized armed rebellion in Kashmir, leave alone promoting a militant, or as Agnihotri has shown, “comparing him to Bhagat Singh”.

Coming to the facts, despite Pandit bodies themselves calling the death toll of Pandits in hundreds, with the Jammu and Kashmir government maintaining 289 as an official figure, the movie claims one lac pandits have been killed by drowning them in Dal Lake. There are no reports of mass killings, except for the fateful Nadimarg massacre where 23 Pandits were killed, as reports say, by militants who were donning army fatigues.

Now if this counts as “genocide” as repeatedly mentioned by Agnihotri in the movie, the term, if not gatekept, could have had more incidents like the Gawkadal massacre, Bijbehara massacre, Sopore massacre, Kupwara massacre, and tens more. Even the death toll, if not lacs but tens of thousands would be of Muslims alone. These makers have filtered this all.

But this is about Pandits and we should stick to the same. Comparing a bigger tragedy to a smaller one won’t ease the pain of either.

There are hundreds of more things to be debunked from this, like showing the Kashmiri Muslims entering a Srinagar hospital with guns and firing indiscriminately at Hindu patients admitted. They have been admitted there after blasts rock their houses specifically in Srinagar. Though no such spree of blasts has ever been reported from the Pandit community in Kashmir, even the hospital (Lal Ded) shown as an emergency ward has been a gynecology clinic since the 1970s till today.

Agnihotri has also shown Kashmiri Pandits have been forcibly converted to Islam since medieval times. Now, this can be easily and interestingly debunked. Kashmir has a rich Sufi tradition. Shahi-Hamdan an Iranian merchant who came to Kashmir spread the message of Islam alongside teaching locals the art of handicrafts. The teachings have been so cohesive that even in Masjids of Kashmir, most of the chants are similarly tuned to Bhajans in temples.

Like many Pandits, Muslim households here desist from consuming meat on specific days and even many of the Muslim saints here are Shakaharis.

Kashmiri Muslims historically are seen as descendants of Pandits and these Pandits too hold faith in Sufi shrines. Even my father’s friend, Bhushan Lal Sidha would always swear in the name “Reshimoal Sahab,” a Sufi saint whose shrine is in Anantnag.