Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined a growing number of BJP leaders who have praised and promoted director Vivek Agnihotri's controversial new film The Kashmir Files.

Modi said that the film accurately depicted the violence against Kashmir's Pandit community, and accused unnamed individuals of attempting to discredit it. While some have questioned the film's approach to the Kashmir issue, the way in which it is being weaponised by Sangh Parivar and BJP activists and officials to create anti-Muslim prejudice on a large scale is of more concern.

Multiple videos of aggressive young men encouraging physical violence and advocating for a Muslim boycott have emerged from movie theatres in the last week.

BJP leaders have promoted several of these videos, apparently to show that the film has struck a chord with regular Hindus.

The Background

The film depicts the departure of Kashmiri Pandits from the state after insurgency broke out in 1989 and terrorists began targeting the community. Thousands of them were forced to flee their homes and spread across India. According to studies conducted by several organisations, 399 people were killed between 1990 and 2011, with 7% of those killed in the first year alone, according to the Kashmir Pandit Sangharsh Samiti. The figure has since increased to 655. Other estimates range between 700 and 1,300 people.

Many more, according to the movie, died as a result of the exodus, which is blamed on the Congress, liberals, human rights wallahs, Naxal sympathisers, and, of course, Muslims – in other words, the typical suspects blamed for the country's troubles. 

A film that is both superficial and exploitative

The Kashmir Files alternate between two timelines, from 1990 to 2016, presenting two versions of the country - two villains. If the one set in the past, in Kashmir, contains "terrorists," the one set in the present, at ANU in Delhi, features "students, intellectuals, professors, and media." In 1990, terrorists assassinate Pushkar Nath Pandit a village teacher, and murder his son. Krishna, an ANU student who is clueless about his family's – and country’s – heritage, looks up to a professor, Radhika Menon , who is preoccupied on releasing Kashmir in the present moment.

One of the best documentaries ever created is Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), about the Nazi Party meeting in Nuremberg, which was attended by 700,000 people. It is a master class not just in cinema, but also in propaganda, since it depicts an idealised vision of German manhood – blonde, blue-eyed, and fit – as well as Nazi Germany's flawless organisational skills.

The film was commissioned by Adolf Hitler, who also served as executive producer. Riefenstahl, who had previously worked as a commercial actor, had become Hitler's favourite filmmaker and a key propagandist for the Third Reich at the time. Olympia (1938), a critically praised documentary about the 1936 Olympics, which were designed to showcase Nazi Germany to the rest of the world and in which African-American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals and shattered the dictator's idea of Aryan supremacy. This earned her even more international acclaim and accolades for pioneering filmmaking techniques, firmly cementing her place in the pantheon of directors. She remained an unapologetic propagandist as a result of this.

The BJP may have found its own Leni Riefenstahl in Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, even if he falls far short of her cinematic standards. With The Kashmir Files, Agnihotri has become the BJP's favourite director, and the film's messaging and aesthetics are perfectly aligned with the party's, as evidenced by Narendra Modi's and his supporters' enthusiastic support.

Agnihotri uses the tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits as a canvas to illustrate his own perspective in The Kashmir Files. This worldview coincides with that of the ruling Hindu nationalists, which explains why the film has been made tax-free in several states governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. 

A film lacks historical context and ignores the fact that the terrorists killed hundreds of Muslims, including members of the National Conference, whose leader Farooq Abdullah is chastised by Agnihotri. In between, the movie makes an oblique insinuation that the migration and killings would not have occurred if Article 370 had been repealed, as the Modi government did in 2019. It's a big-screen version of an angry WhatsApp diatribe with no respect for truth. The scope of the slaughter is overstated, perhaps because Agnihotri believes that the word "genocide" solely refers to numbers.

Final Thoughts

There have been many films on the exodus from India's cinema heartland in the past (Sheen in 2004, Shikara in 2020). These have all failed, perhaps because their narrative was tainted and they lacked state support, rather than because they had something unique to sell. The Kashmir Files too is an equally mediocre film and yet, merely two years since Shikara, a lot has changed in India for all of us.

According to several Kashmiri Hindu think tanks, the Pakistan-backed insurgency that began in Kashmir in 1989 has hurt all of its residents, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In the winter of 1990, many Kashmiri Hindus were forced to evacuate their homes after several of their relatives and acquaintances were slain, raped, maimed, intimidated, and threatened.

The film's supporters and opponents should be kept separate from limited political vote bank considerations. The heinous event of Hindus fleeing Jammu and Kashmir was a planned act of terror carried out at the behest of forces hostile to our national security and cohesion. The ignominy of Hindus living in exile in their own country should not be tolerated by the Kashmiri Pandits or the country. As a result, in the wider interest of national security, all political parties should prioritise the dignified rehabilitation of Hindus, compensation for their losses, and assurance of their protection.