NEW DELHI: Hindu hardliners have jumped on an explosive new film endorsed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the alleged mass flight of Hindus from occupied Kashmir 30 years ago to stir up hatred against Muslims.

The Kashmir Files is the latest Bollywood offering to tackle themes close to the political agenda of Modi’s government, critics say.

Released last month and already one of the country’s highest-grossing films this year, it accuses Kashmiri fighters of committing excesses against Hindus and forcing hundreds of thousands of them to the valley during the early 1990s.

Authorities have made entrance to the film tax-free in many Indian states, with police and others given time off to go watch.

Numerous videos shared on social media and verified as genuine have shown people in cinemas calling for revenge and for Muslims to be killed.

One clip shows Swami Jeetendranand, a Hindu monk, leading a crowd in nationalist and anti-Muslim chants.

“We think that we are safe, but we are safe as long as they don’t attack us,” he rails. “(Muslims) are not only dangerous to India but to the whole world.”

Fact or fiction?

A heavy-handed response by the Indian military to attacks on Kashmiri fighters has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims.

According to right-wing Hindu groups, around 200,000 Kashmiri Hindus — known as Pandits — fled after the anti-India resistance gained momentum in the late 1980s. Up to 219 may have been killed, according to official figures.

Redressing this “genocide” and “exodus”, as right-wing Hindu groups call it, has long been a central theme of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

In 2019, the Modi government — often accused of marginalising and vilifying India’s 200 million Muslims — revoked occupied Kashmir’s partial autonomy and imposed a vice-like security blanket.

But Sanjay Kaw, a Kashmiri Pandit journalist who himself fled in the 1990s, said the movie makes no allusion to the persecution of the Muslim community either before or since.

“One of my relatives was shot dead... barely 300 metres away from our home,” Kaw said.

“The movie only talks about the exodus part, and only refers to the failure of the state but not the things that led to the situation.”

BJP agenda

The movie’s director Vivek Agnihotri, an avowed Modi fan, said he wanted to give “some dignity to the people who have been hurt”.

“Nobody asked Steven Spielberg why there were a few violent reactions to Schindler’s List,” he said, referring to the 1993 movie that was widely acclaimed as historically accurate.

“Give (people) the right to react the way they want to react. As long as they are not hurting anybody physically, I think it’s fine,” Agnihotri added.

But the film “certainly has an agenda”, said documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, as it “strongly feeds into the current Islamophobic discourse in our society”.

“I think the film makes those goals (of the BJP) quite explicit: which is basically about setting up Kashmir as a kind of ideological pole for their vision of a new resurgent Hindu India,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2022