The Kashmir Files: When art becomes a communal weapon

A new movie, The Kashmir Files, released earlier this month, has once again opened the pandora's box of communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India, which has been systematically escalating ever since the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party came to power.  

The film, released on 11 March, is based on the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, who are also called Kashmiri Pandits, from Jammu and Kashmir, in the 1990s.

Written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri, the film stars Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, and Pallavi Joshi. 

The film follows the story of Krishna Pandit (Darshan Kumar), a student caught between two conflicting narratives of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of 1990. One side of the narrative is represented by his grandfather, Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher), who had been struggling for 30 years to get justice for the exodus, while the other is represented by a pro-Azadi JNU professor (Pallavi Joshi), who claims that no such amends are necessary. 

Krishna was under the impression that his parents were killed in an accident, as told by his grandfather. The plot, however, reveals that they were in fact murdered by Muslim militants. 

The Kashmir Files has received adulation and criticism in equal measure. Among the many upsetting scenes, Krishna's father was killed on screen by a local militant while he was hiding in a container of rice. His mother was later forced to eat the blood-soaked rice.

The film received a lot of praise from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and key ministers in his BJP government. Several BJP-ruled states have exempted the film from entertainment tax, with other BJP governments likely to follow suit. Furthermore, police personnel in Madhya Pradesh state have also been offered a day off to watch it.  

The Muslim-majority Kashmir has seen an armed insurgency against Indian rule since the late 1980s, with some seeking full independence for Kashmir while others seek the region's accession from Pakistan. The ongoing conflicts have led to a large number of casualties, with Indian security agencies inflicting heavy atrocities among the Muslim population, while Muslim insurgents have targeted the region's non-Muslim minority populations—most notably that of Kashmiri Hindus— which led to their exodus out of the Kashmir Valley.

Stutee Ghosh of The Quint praised the film for making a compelling case for Kashmiri Pandits. 

"I'm a little baffled by this constant refrain that this is a story that has not been told. It's not been told by Bollywood but Bollywood doesn't tell these stories," said Sanjay Kak to the BBC, a Kashmiri Pandit and a documentary filmmaker who has covered the region extensively. 

The controversy stemming from the film, however, is not from the history of the exodus. The film demonises Muslims and has been described as being Islamophobic. It has faced charges of historical revisionism, and is seen as propaganda aligned with the ruling party ideology of India. 

Vivek Agnihotri, the film's director, who is a supporter of BJP, has been accused of inaccuracies. A court – earlier this month – restrained him from including scenes depicting an air force squadron leader and his death, after the man's wife filed a suit saying the details were factually incorrect. 

Shubhra Gupta, reviewing for The Indian Express, said the film was a work of propaganda aligned with the ruling party's discourse that only aimed to stoke the "deep-seated anger" of Pandits. 

Photo: Collected

Anuj Kumar, reviewing for The Hindu, described the film as disturbing, and a work of historical revisionism, sprinkled with some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions, coupled with compelling performances and brutally intense visualisations aimed at inciting hatred against Muslims. 

Shilajit Mitra of The New Indian Express said that the film is exploiting the suffering of Kashmiri Pandits by doing away with all nuance in service of a communal agenda. 

Rahul Desai, reviewing for Film Companion, found the work to be a fantasy-revisionism rant lacking in clarity, craft, and sense, where every Muslim was a Nazi and every Hindu, a Jew. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded to negative critic reviews by claiming that there is a conspiracy to discredit the film. 

Modi's support for The Kashmir Files, however, is on brand with his ideology. He believes that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, which contrasts the principles of Gandhi, the father of India, who expresses a strong sentiment that the state should undoubtedly be secular. Modi's government has steadily pursued the persecution of religious minorities since the beginning of his political career, particularly fostering prejudice against Muslims in India. 

Furthermore, Modi is also a permanent member of RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) who have been known to admire Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for their ideology of racial purity.

The Gujrat Pogrom in 2002 unfolded under the watch of Narendra Modi, who served as the Chief Minister.  Large parts of the state were seized by one of the most gruesome communal massacres in Indian history. Violence swept over 20 out of the 25 districts of Gujarat for several weeks, persisting in some places for months, as state officials chose to do little to stem or control the violence. 

More than a thousand people, majority of whom were Muslim, were slaughtered.

The killings were exceptional not only for their numbers, but for their ruthlessness, ferocity and brutality: mass rape; sexual humiliation of women in public; battering and burning alive of girls, boys, women and men. 

Tens of thousands of homes and small business establishments were set aflame, and cattle and lifetime savings were looted. Hundreds of religious shrines were also desecrated and destroyed.

After experiencing such gruesome violence under Modi's watch, one would think he would be more careful about openly supporting propaganda films which could very well lead provoke violence against the Muslim communities in India. But perhaps that is exactly what he wants.