Kashmir Files

Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has a truth to tell and he has dared to tell it through his latest film, 'The Kashmir Files'.

It is the truths that we hide that destroy us. As one of the characters in the movie, himself a journalist, observes, it is not the lies that we tell that are so reprehensible. Though a feature film, The Kashmir Files retains a documentary feel, like Schindler’s List. Also, like the latter, Agnihotri’s object is not to push propaganda but tell a human story. There is a PIL in court seeking to block its release. Agnihotri wrote and directed the film, which he asserts is based on facts and testimonies. The film is too hot to handle for our political class, even if some of them might support it tacitly. For in this movie, even their children have acted, played parts or characters which are so difficult even to watch that they must have been even more challenging to enact. Seven times they have been scattered across their ancestral lands of Bharatvarsha. Their descendants still go by the name of “Sarasvat Brahmins” and can be found in distant corners of India, from the North to the South, from the West to the East. Living in the enchanting vale of Kashmir in the Himalayas, they too seemed like Shiva’s own or chosen ones. A tiny minority already, they were attacked, killed, and hounded out by India’s largest minority, the Muslims, in this case of the Valley, under directions from Pakistani-trained local and cross-border terrorists who went by the euphemistic misnomer “freedom fighters” or “militants”. As narrated in the movie, five hundred thousand were displaced; thousands lost their lives; many women were raped or dishonoured; even children were not spared. Even today, when the film is ready for its commercial release, there are attempts to ban it. Only this that they were Hindus in a state which our enemies, both external and internal, wanted to break from India and turn into an Islamic republic. Was it a just God who allowed this to happen to them?