DR. GHULAM NABI FAI
‘Early reviews in the Indian media had found the film deeply Islamophobic, dishonest, and a provocation.’ Sanjay Kak, Kashmiri Pandit filmmaker and writer
This movie feeds into cycles of hate and revenge. It collapses Kashmir’s history and politics into an Islamophobic morality tale that is palatable and profitable to Hindutva India. Dr. Nitasha Kaul, Kashmiri Pandit novelist and academic.
“The Kashmir Files” written by Vivek Agnihotri is an Indian film which was released on March 11, 2022. The focus of the film is the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus (Pandits) in Jammu & Kashmir. The conclusion of the film is that 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits was a genocide.
Among the many harms of the film is the intimate wrong it does to people from the Kashmir Valley. Both Muslims and Pandits bear the scars of conflict. Both communities need to share painful histories to get past them. These histories are not always of mutual recrimination but also of friendships and a common way of life lost in the armed conflict. The Kashmir Files seems to close off the possibility of a space where such longing may be expressed.
Is ‘The Kashmir Files’ myth or reality? The discourse needs to be supplemented with facts and figures.
But before presenting my personal observations, let me put forth the analysis of some prominent Pandits (Kashmiri Hindus) and Indian scholars.
Sanjay Kak, an eminent and celebrated documentary filmmaker, and writer but more importantly a Kashmiri Pandit himself who wrote an opinion piece in Al-Jazeera under the heading, ‘THE DANGEROUS ‘TRUTH’ OF THE KASHMIR FILES’ on April 14, 2022. He said that ‘early reviews in the Indian media had found the film deeply Islamophobic, dishonest, and a provocation.’
Sanjay Kak said that as a documentary filmmaker and writer whose work has centred on Kashmir for almost two decades, I have always been confounded by the facts – or the lack of them – of the departure of the community in 1990. My community, I should say, for, I am a Kashmiri Pandit. There is little clarity about even the most elementary things. We also know that early in 1990 some Kashmiri Pandit families began to flee in fear. Their leaving was probably intended as a temporary move though it was to prove tragically permanent for most. We also know that despite all this, at least 4,000 Kashmiri Pandit families never left their homes. They have continued to live in Kashmir, not in secure ghettos, but scattered across the valley. Living in what often feels like a war zone, without extended networks of family and community, their lives are not easy. But nor is life easy for their Muslim neighbours, with whom they live in what has come to be recognised as one of the most militarised zones in the world.
The simplest questions fail to yield reliable answers, Kak warned. How many Kashmiri Pandits lived in the valley prior to 1990? The figures conjured up by the right-wing fluctuate between 500,000 and 700,000, although considered estimates place it at about 170,000. How many of them left the Kashmir Valley after 1990? A recent response by the region’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commissioner placed the figure at 135,426, although on inflamed television debates the needle again fluctuates between 500,00 and 700,000 and can inexplicably go up to a million.
Ipsita Chakraverty, an Indian artist, writer and activist wrote in Scroll.in, on March 19, 2022, “As for the numbers displaced, researcher Alexander Evans suggests there were 160,000-170,000 Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley in 1990, most of whom fled in the violence. Other scholars claim the numbers were lower. The Jammu and Kashmir government’s website says 60,000 Kashmiri Hindu families migrated out of the Valley during the violence, which still does not match the five lakh figure.
Sanjay Kak explained, “This is a film that brutalises its audience with scenes of such extreme violence that it eventually silences the possibility of considering alternative narratives that we know to be true. I could think of few: although terrible tragedies did happen to many individuals, most Kashmiri Pandit families were not betrayed by their Muslim neighbours. While some properties were torched and destroyed, most temples and homes were not ransacked or looted, and many more have run to ruin over years of neglect. Most critically, this myopic narrative succeeds in obscuring the fact that what happened in Kashmir in the 1990s was not centrally a conflict between Muslims and Hindus. It was an uprising against the Indian state.”
