'The Kashmir Files': Is this the 'truth' that most of India is beating to now?

An unabashed propaganda vehicle, the film presents a laundry list of the pet concerns of the Hindu Right

'The Kashmir Files' could have been a serious attempt to portray the very real tragedy of the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in early 1990. The growing separatist movement, aided and fuelled by Pakistan, the terror campaign against the Pandits, a minority group accounting for a large chunk of Jammu and Kashmir's social elite, the political chicanery, the criminal mismanagement of an increasingly volatile situation, and the callousness of the authorities towards the plight of the displaced Pandits — these are historical facts that could have been depicted with sensitivity, and with an eye on the way countless human lives are destroyed because a few people want to profit from stoking hatred and strife.

But as you watch this film, it becomes obvious that director Vivek Agnihotri is working on a very different agenda. Instead of sensitivity, you get horror that verges on the caricature; instead of tragedy, you get a shriek of propaganda; instead of a human story of displacement and wrong, you get a laundry list of the pet concerns of the Hindu Right; instead of a repudiation of hate, and an overriding sense of the colossal loss that divisiveness brings in its wake, you get an unsubtle incitement to still more hate.

And yet this film has been endorsed by none other than the prime minister of India. It has been made tax-free in most Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states, and leaders of the ruling party have been rooting for it on social media. In other words, the BJP and the Narendra Modi government have made it clear that this film is perfectly aligned to their version of 'truth', that this is what they, too, stand for.

Also Read | The Kashmir Files: Using art for the cause of hate

The truth, though, is that video clips have emerged showing members of the audience, mostly young men, shouting hate-filled slogans against Muslims after watching 'The Kashmir Files'. The truth is that this is a film where all Muslim characters have been portrayed as evil without exception, out to kill Hindus, or, at the very least, drive them out of their homeland. Every one of them has been cast as a rabid Hindu-hater, a militant, a murderer, a rapist, a traitor, a separatist. Not one is shown to be a moderate, peace-loving, regular human being. Even Muslim women and children are not spared — the women won't let Hindus collect their ration, the children shout anti-Hindu slogans and beat up Hindu kids.

Agnihotri can feel justly proud of his achievement here. Perhaps no other film in the history of cinema — barring some Nazi propaganda films in Hitler's Germany — has managed to demonise an entire people and not show a single one of them with an iota of humanity or decency. Think of the films about the atrocities of the Third Reich. While depicting the persecution and murder of Jews, they also dwelt on the many ordinary Germans who tried to protect their Jewish friends and neighbours from the state's programme to annihilate them.

But Agnihotri doesn't let anything dilute the force of his toxic message. In fact, to weaponise it further, he shows the aggressors committing acts of horrific savagery. In the final scene of the film, the camera lingers a long time on the bullet hole on the forehead of a young boy who has just been gunned down by a militant. Though these scenes are crudely shot and are unabashedly sensational and overdone, they are finding their mark, as is evident from the video clips of those fine specimens of Hindu Indian manhood erupting into paroxysms of communal rage after watching the film.

Also Read | The distorted view of 'The Kashmir Files'

What makes this film dangerous is that it is built on an element of truth, and hence in the mind of the viewers, everything it portrays assumes the colour of truth. Yes, many Kashmiri Pandits lost their lives in that terrible, violent winter of 1990. But the official numbers are nowhere near Agnihotri's claim that 4000 Kashmiri Pandits were killed at the time. It was "genocide, not an exodus," says Anupam Kher's character in the film, echoing another favourite theme of the Hindu Right. However, according to data from the Jammu and Kashmir government, 219 Pandits were killed between 1989 and 2004. Even the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti says that 357 Hindus were killed in Kashmir in 1990.

Agnihotri has other boxes to check. There is the justification for the abolition of Article 370, which was abrogated by the BJP government in August 2019; there is the vilification of the media; and there is the vitriol directed at liberals, who are portrayed as sympathisers of separatism. The den of these dangerous anti-national liberals is none other than a university in Delhi called ANU (no prizes for guessing what that stands for), where a professor named Radhika Menon — brilliantly played by Pallavi Joshi, the only real actor in the film while the rest, led by Anupam Kher, ham their way through — brainwashes her students into turning against the Indian state and allying with the interests of separatists in Jammu and Kashmir.

Radhika is, in fact, the very acme of liberalism according to India's Hindu Right. She is the archetype of that evil, and mythical, group called 'urban Naxals (a term that was coined by Agnihotri himself), cunningly plotting against national interest, fraternising with terrorists and acting on behalf of those who are out to break the country. Hence, the cry of 'azaadi' on their lips can never be about freedom from oppression and hate and inequality — it is only about ruining India.

The stream of right-wing propaganda in 'The Kashmir Files' is so crude and relentless that after a point, it becomes ridiculous. And, not to forget, it comes complete with the obligatory genuflexion to Narendra Modi ('a leader who is feared as opposed to Vajpayee or Nehru who wanted to be loved'), and an interminable speech about ancient Hindu civilisation's glorious achievements in every field of knowledge before it was put to the sword by Islamic oppressors.

We have heard all of this before. Since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, pieces of this Hindu nationalistic, divisive, anti-intellectual narrative have been repeatedly thrust upon the national consciousness. What 'The Kashmir Files' does is to tie it all together into a radioactive little package and wheel it out on the emotive subject of the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits from their homeland.

The chilling fact is that the film is hitting a chord with a majority of viewers. It is running to packed houses around the country. As a means of propagating the government's version of 'truth' and indoctrinating the masses with it, 'The Kashmir Files' seems to have already won the day.

So is this the truth that most of India is beating to now? If that is so, the other undeniable truth is that there is no cohesive force in the country at this point to challenge it on the ground.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH