The first time I heard about the Kashmiri Pandit genocide of 1990, I told my friend the exact same thing that the hero of The Kashmir Files said – if it happened like you said, it would have been all over the media. I asked him how come I didn’t get to read about this anywhere? I told him that I trust our awesome media will not hide crimes like this and that he is simply exaggerating events to further his propaganda. I believed in my “propaganda” up until the time I met a Kashmir Pandit a few years later. He was a well-educated professional who spoke about his personal experiences of the trauma and how they rebuilt their life afterwards.

During those times, there was this constant churn of narrative in the media on how the “oppressed” people are picking up guns. This narrative was being built in defense of both Naxalism and Islamic terrorism. And I couldn’t help but wonder – the Kashmiri Pandits could have very well chosen that route, but they chose peace; they chose to live a worthy life while nursing grievous wounds. And when Mithun Chakraborty delivers a similar one liner in The Kashmir Files, my mind went back to all those years where the transformation from ignorance to enlightenment happened.

The experience of watching The Kashmir Files is very numbing is because it is relatable to many people at different levels. The gory nature of the murders; the ghastly torture; the subsequent normalizing of the genocide; the narrative building against the Pandits – all of these are captured in great detail by the writer and director Vivek Agnihotri. A genocide of this scale should have resulted in multiple movies already, but The Kashmir Files is the first movie that brings this reality to the big screen. Before the movie began, Vivek Agnihotri told us why. Because there was no producer from the famed Mumbai industry who came forward to make a movie on this. He then introduced us to the producer of the movie, Abhishek Agarwal as the real hero of this project! Vivek Agnihotri also spoke about the various struggles he had to go through to make this movie and how Pallavi Joshi stood by him all through this struggle.

And Vivek Agnihotri is right – all viewpoints of the Kashmir issue were highlighted in the movie. The conversations in the movie often make engaging viewing and even though the run time is close to 3 hours, there is seldom any instance of monotony that sets in. At many instances in the movie, you would be tempted to dismiss certain scenes as the director’s creative freedom. Until you realize, they are actually not. For example, terrorist Farooq Ahmad Dar actually gave an interview in which he said he killed 20 Kashmiri Hindus. But this is not about whether the movie is a brilliantly made one; whether the movie will receive “critical acclaim”; or whether this movie is a badly made one.

This should be about why such a movie was not made till now. This should be about how The Kashmir Files is the first movie to be made on the gory happenings of January 1990 and the subsequent trauma. This should be about why no one in the media or movie industry dared to highlight the slogans that were raised through the loudspeakers of mosques to ‘Ralive, tsalive, galive’. This should be about how JKLF was treated with kids gloves by many governments and how JKLF got a seat at the Prime Minister of India’s table also. This should be about the chicanery of our narrative builders in suppressing the trauma of Kashmiri Pandits.

It took 32 years to get here. The long time duration should not and cannot be used as an excuse to let go of discussing the reality of the ghastly events of 1990. Because even in the year 2020, we have newspapers still trying to tell us that what happened was a mere expulsion - “The expulsion of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley was grossly unjust.” – wrote Rajeev Bhargava in The Hindu just 2 years back. Imagine if we didn’t have social media to amplify the reality of 1990, I would have still lived under the illusion that a simple “expulsion” was being exaggerated as murder and genocide by my friend. I would have tried to brainwash him instead! The Kashmir Files is a story that should have been told 32 years back. It took a team led by Vivek Agnihotri to be told. And told how!

Image source: TOI