'The Kashmir Files' divides India: Bollywood triumph or anti-Muslim propaganda?

As the lights come up and the credits begin to roll on The Kashmir Files, a Hindu man gets to his feet to yell at his fellow movie-goers: "Shoot the traitors." "Death to Muslims." "We will have our revenge."

Soon other voices join him, their hate-filled shouts briefly transforming the cinema into a murderous anti-Muslim rally, with the crowd whipped into a frenzy by the controversial film they have just seen. Sometimes, the Islamophobic chanting spills out into the streets outside.

These are the disturbing scenes, captured on video and shared widely on social media, that have played out at cinemas across India showing The Kashmir Files. The Hindi-language drama, released earlier this month, has become a box-office smash - even as it polarises Indian viewers.

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For its defenders, the film is a masterful Bollywood depiction of one of the darkest chapters of modern Indian history: the exodus of some 100,000 Hindus from the Kashmir Valley following an uprising in 1990. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given the movie his endorsement and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actively sought to promote it.

But The Kashmir Files' critics call it a crude, inflammatory piece of propaganda that's intended to incite anti-Muslim hatred and weaponise the BJP's Hindu-nationalist agenda. Singapore, the UAE and Qatar have even banned it from being screened, according to director Vivek Agnithori, who was assigned a high-level security detail by the Indian government after he received death threats in response to the film.

Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, also known as Pandits, fled the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley between January and March 1990 as it became increasingly wracked by violence amid a nascent separatist insurgency that continues to this day.

Faced with attacks and threats against their lives, many Pandits fled the region with nothing but the clothes on their backs - leaving behind ancestral lands, homes, businesses and possessions. Some ended up destitute in camps for the internally displaced.

The Kashmir Files depicts this mass exodus as an act of genocide - a term right-wing Hindu groups who champion the Pandits' cause have long used to describe the event - perpetrated by Islamist militants.

Modi's BJP has thrown its weight behind this depiction, with government minister Hardeep Singh Puri saying on Twitter that the film's "nuanced portrayal and sensitive storytelling [do] full justice to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits".

BJP MPs, affiliated companies and colleges have organised private screenings of The Kashmir Files, as some states the party controls have waived the taxes normally imposed on cinema tickets specially for the film, with government employees encouraged to take the day off to watch it.

Dr Shakti Bhan Khanna, a New Delhi-based gynaecologist and Kashmiri Pandit, said the film was "100 per cent true" to her experience of fleeing the region decades ago and "shows events exactly as they happened".

"To those who say it demonises Kashmiri Muslims, all I can say is that if someone is being tortured, someone is doing the torturing," she said.

Others, however, have accused the film of revisionism, factual inaccuracies, stoking anti-Muslim sentiment and ignoring the complex and varied reasons behind the mass exodus.

Film critic Rahul Desai described the film as a "fantasy-revisionist rant lacking in clarity, craft, and sense, where every Muslim was a Nazi and every Hindu, a Jew." It was, he said, "propaganda that strove only to tune in with the Hindu-nationalist mood of the nation".

Similar sentiments were shared by opposition politician Jairam Ramesh on Twitter, who said the film "twists facts, [and] distorts history to whip up anger and promote violence". "Some films inspire change. The Kashmir Files incites hate," he said.

Shashi Tharoor, a fellow Congress party member, said in response to a Facebook post calling for acknowledgement of the Pandits' suffering that "we must stand up for their rights". "But demonising Kashmiri Muslims doesn't help the Pandits either," he said. "Hatred divides and kills."

Concerns that the film might foment violence led Delhi police to increase security in some neighbourhoods upon its release, with a Muslim journalist in the capital who did not want to be named saying he feared it might "trigger a massacre of Muslims" because it was so provocative.

Mehru Jaffer, an Indian historian and author, said she welcomed public discussion of the "shameful period" of Kashmir's history that was the Pandits' exodus, but expressed regret that the film was politicised and had not sought "to act as a balm on old wounds [and] suggest ways of coming together".

"This film is not about the tragedy suffered by Pandits but about Hindu nationalism," she said. "It is a politically motivated film that in the long run may harm India more than heal the fault lines that already exist."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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