The Misplaced Kashmir Files: Kashmiri Pandits Speak

Since early March, India has been embroiled in a national controversy surrounding the release of The Kashmir Files—the 170-minute Bollywood feature film that purports to shed light on the exodus of Hindus (known as Pandits) from the Kashmir Valley during the insurgency in the 1990s. The film has been lauded by India’s ruling BJP government, receiving tax breaks and even Modi’s personal stamp of approval, and has triggered a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment and virulent hate speech at showings throughout the country. 

The Kashmir Files is nationalistic propaganda at its finest, presenting a misleading and dangerously one-sided narrative that exaggerates figures, ignores conflicting information, and obscures inconvenient truths to push a blatantly politicized agenda.

As if the half-truths depicted in The Kashmir Files were not bad enough, one of the biggest lies being perpetrated by Hindu nationalists is that those who dare to criticize the film are “anti-Pandit” and “anti-India.”

In this post, HfHR brings together the sane voices of several prominent Kashmiri Pandits whose powerful testimonies counter that preposterous claim.

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Former Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, a Kashmiri Pandit, recently spoke at a webinar organized by Anhad, Delhi on the ominous implications of the film and the “raging narrative” that it has unleashed.

Here are some powerful quotes from his talk. 

“My pain is also huge. My soul has been clawed out from its geo-political mooring in the valley.”

“Not all are lies. Not all truth either. [The Kashmir Files] is an attempt to give spin to the unfortunate and deeply saddening exit and tragic exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits.”

“What the film seeks to do is to vilify, downplay, and delegitimize the Kashmiri Muslims and their own pain and suffering for 32 years. There is deafening silence on that.”

“Thinking and forward-looking individuals see the film as weaponizing the pain and suffering of Kashmiri Pandits and their memories for political, communal and possibly electoral considerations.”

“The film shows the entire Kashmiri Muslim community as terrorists. They stand brutalized and dehumanized.”

“Can the files heal the wounds?” was the title of the webinar. Mr. Kak thinks otherwise, but is still optimistic that his community will see through the propaganda and that the truth will ultimately prevail. 

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Dr. Nitasha Kaul is a Kashmiri novelist, academic, poet, economist and artist. She is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster. She recently wrote in the News Minute about her views of the film.

Here are some quotes:

“I speak as a Kashmiri who has lost the peace of her homeland to entrenched and enduring conflict and had the identity of her homeland stripped by Hindutva India in August 2019. I speak as a Kashmiri, as a Kashmiri Pandit woman, as a senior academic who has worked for years on Kashmir, as a poet who has lamented the losses of Kashmir, as a novelist whose book Future Tense published months after the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy and tells precisely the interconnected stories of conflicts and traumas faced by different kinds of Kashmiris – Hindu, Muslim, Shia, Sunni, male, female, from Srinagar, from villages, and more.”

“Against this backdrop, the recently released movie The Kashmir Files is communal propaganda by an Indian filmmaker that trades upon this suffering. Unsurprisingly, it fits right into mainstream contemporary India.”

“This movie emphasises the exceptionalism of Kashmiri Pandit suffering and the ubiquity of Kashmiri Muslim barbarity.”

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 In addition to these prominent voices, the film has been criticized by ordinary citizens as well, such as these Kashmiri Pandits living in Jagti Township in Jammu, who spoke forthrightly to the BBC about what The Kashmir Files means to their future.  

Here are some examples of what they had to say:

“The differences we worked so hard to resolve will only be exacerbated by this film given that 5,000 Pandit families still reside in Kashmir.”

“A film-maker who makes a film about the genocide of the other side will be considered bold in my eyes….I appeal to other film-makers to make a movie about the suffering of the majority community there [Kashmiri Muslims] along with ours so that everybody gets to know that even they have been victims of Pakistani sponsored violence.”

“But I am scared of returning after remembering all the visuals of that time.”

“Our neighbors, I won’t name them, were threatened against supporting or providing shelter to us.”

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After participating in a protest in San Francisco against the August 2019 lock-down of Kashmir, HfHR cofounder Raju Rajagopal wrote the following in a blog titled “Let Kashmir Speak”: 

“Looking over to the other side of the plaza at the counter demonstration in support of Kashmiri Pandits and the Indian government, I couldn’t help but think how over the years I have felt anguish and compassion for them as they were cruelly expelled from the valley; then how successive governments have treated them as pawns, talking opportunistically about their plight without doing anything to actually improve their lives or enable them to return to their home; and now as they seem to have thrown in their lot with the brutal actions of India and Hindutva forces, I wondered how this community hopes to go back to their homes in Kashmir and live in peace and amity with their Muslim neighbors.”

 Judging by the responses of many progressive and forward-looking Kashmiri Pandits, The Kashmir Files may make it even harder for them to return to their former homes in peace.

More ominously, the film only adds more “ammunition” to open calls for genocide of Muslims all across India.