The scenes of bloodshed, torture, and otherisation of Pandits have been filmed with brutal intensity.

It is more like a rejoinder to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, as the film tries to suggest that the Kashmiri Muslims deserved to suffer after what they did to the Pandits and other minorities.Ī disturbing take, it grips and gripes in turns. Unlike Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s films on the subject, Agnihotri has no time for romance in the Valley. In their narrative, Kashmir was faced with a clash of civilisations, and the Pandits were left to die by the State and the central government to appease one community. The villain of the piece is Bitta, who seems like a combination of real-life Ghulam Mohammad Dar alias Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, the faces of terror outfit Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front. When Krishna’s grandfather Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher) dies, he returns to Kashmir with his ashes and meets four of his grandfather’s friends who reveal the ‘real’ story of Kashmir to Krishna, and of course, the audience.

Here, Krishna (Darshan Kumar), a Kashmiri Pandit and student of a premier university, modelled on Jawaharlal Nehru University, has been tutored by his ‘liberal’ teacher Radhika Menon (Pallavi Joshi) into believing that the secessionist movement in Kashmir is akin to India’s Freedom Movement.

The film is based on the testimonies of the people scarred for generations by the insurgency in the State, and presents the tragic exodus as a full-scale genocide, akin to the Holocaust, that was deliberately kept away from the rest of India by the media, the ‘intellectual’ lobby and the government of the day because of their vested interests.Īgnihotri has improved upon the form he adopted in The Tashkent Files where he presented his take on former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death through memories and flashbacks, with the narrative going back and forth in time. The Kashmiri Pandits’ pain is real and should be expressed in popular culture, but it deserved a more nuanced, more objective take rather than the ‘us vs them’ worldview that Agnihotri has propagated over 170 minutes. Employing some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions, it propels an alternative view about the Kashmir issue, with the intent to not just provoke. Mounted like a revisionist docudrama, that tracks the tragic exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from their homeland in the 1990s, The Kashmir Files is essentially a battle of narratives, where Agnihotri has determinedly sided with one version of the events. Once upon a time, writer-director Vivek Agnihotri told us a Hate Story this week, he has etched yet another.

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