Summary
All the actors in Kashmir Files, including not very big names, have done well. But in acting, Pallavi Joshi has played the role of leftist professor Radhika Menon. However, the level of sympathy tilts more in favor of Anupam Kher in the role of Kashmiri Pandit Pushkar Nath. He has lived up to his role.
Expansion
Amidst strong support and fierce opposition and extremist narratives of Godi and Khodi media, decided to watch 'The Kashmir Files', with the prejudice that the film would be 'one-sided'. Curious as to why so many people (most of whom are Hindus) are going to see it?
Decided to go to the Sangeet Theater in Bhopal, which is very close to my home. Thought to take stock of the atmosphere first, so half an hour ago I started waiting in line at the ticket window. Seven-eight people were already in line. Those strangers were talking about the film itself. I encountered the first narrative and question mark associated with the film on the same line.
Among those standing waiting for the ticket window to open, three were from different parts of the city and of different professions. Hiding the fact that I was a media person, I started listening silently. It was found that one of them was a lawyer, the other a servant in a private company and the third had some small business. One has compared the atrocities on Kashmiri Pandits to the gas incident in Bhopal 38 years ago.
Said another-
Leave it man, this is an old thing. Forget what happened. We used to study in primary at that time. There are blurry memories.
The third questioned Tapak-
How to forget, more than 10 thousand people including many of my relatives and neighbors were killed by poisonous gas released from the killer Union Carbide factory. We have seen people running away from Bhopal to save their lives.
Of course, it is important to remember the Bhopal gas tragedy, as it is the epitome of capitalist and corporate thinking, but it is better to forget the atrocities committed by our own people on Kashmiri Pandits, because nothing comes from hatred.
On the contrary, the question is, where and why is the origin of this hatred? How can one be so cruel and merciless against the current followers of the religion of one's own forefathers? Especially because Kashmiri Pandits never rebelled?
Never waged any jihad against the Nizam there. Not even when all the relatives and relatives of Kashmiri Pandits were forcibly or voluntarily converting one by one to Islam. Their numbers were not even worthy of treason. Yet why did he become a thorn in the eyes of the majority of Kashmiri Muslims?
Even the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, who resigned from his post instead of stopping the Kashmiri Pandits. That Farooq, whose great-grandfather's father was also a Kashmiri Brahmin and whose gotra was Sapru.
Farooq's father Sheikh Abdullah has mentioned this in his autobiography 'Atish-e-Chinar'.
In the sleep of this thought, the afternoon show was abandoned and many tense faces were seen coming out of the theatre. This tension probably stemmed from the last and perhaps the most painful scene in the film, in which a woman from a Kashmiri Pandit family is publicly robbed and shot one by one, from old men to children. There might be a bit of drama and redundancy in such a scene, but at the level of sensation, it shakes.
Kashmiri Pandits can be run away or driven away from their own land after the arrival of Islam in Iran, forcing the Parsis who follow the original Zoroastrian religion to leave the country or to the Syrians stricken by the terrorists of their own religion.
The question is also, after all, whose country is it originally? Those who have lived there for thousands of years or those who are the majority today and consider human history before the emergence of any religion to be a beacon of rejection?
This is the difference between knowledge and passion. It is a bitter truth that there are some religions in this world who consider the urge to paint the whole world in their colors as the 'real service' of religion. There is facility of conversion in other religions, but there is no prejudice of 'converting the whole house'.
There is no insistence on accepting one's own religious beliefs as superior. This does not mean that there is no place for compassion or humanity in Islam and Christianity, but they were born with the flag of peace and compassion. But when religion and politics become one, it doesn't take long for peace to transform unreasonable violence and compassion into cruelty. There is no facility of conversion in Parsi religion. A child can be a Parsi only if there are Parsi parents, otherwise not.
Some people argue in favor of the Kashmiri people that since long ago they were treated unfairly, hence separatism flourished there. But it is also true that even when there was hardly any instance of saving the very minority Pandits, who are now being called Hindus in the Kashmir Valley. That is, there was silence or explicit acceptance of all in what happened.
More than this, we have seen and heard examples of humanity during the horrific massacre at the time of the Indo-Pak partition on the basis of religion in 1947, when a merciful Muslim saved a Sikh, a compassionate Hindu or a Sikh to save a Muslim family. Everything was at stake. But what was this level of hatred and panic in Kashmir?
A big question is the massacre of Pandits in Kashmir, which is told in the film. Some argue that not so many Kashmiri Pandits were physically killed. This is only propaganda. Of course, lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits fled to Jammu and Delhi, but the exact figure of how many Kashmiri Pandits were killed or not during that period of terror in the Valley will seldom come to the fore.
Because those deaths are not even recorded in the government records. Just like the government has no record of deaths due to lack of oxygen in the second wave of corona. Still, this number is in lakhs, there is no dearth of people who believe that there is no shortage in the general public and media.
Here, some people hold the leaders of the Kashmir Valley responsible for not stopping the forced exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. But in a democracy no local leader can go against the will of the majority. Why only Kashmir, we have seen this in other states also.
Raj dharma, vote got weakened in front of dharma. Even in Kashmir, the leaders there continued to issue statements. Because saving Kashmiri Pandits does not give them any significant electoral advantage. The expected reaction from the leaders of the Kashmir Valley after 'The Kashmir Files' is that this hatred will only increase. But after the Kashmiri Pandits left the valley, it decreased, there is no concrete evidence of this. On the contrary, it was extended. Otherwise, the Kashmiri Pandits would have returned to their homes only after two years of 1990.
Communal riots are not new in this country. There is a lot of violence in passion and hatred. But time heals wounds. Assuming that we have to live together. But in Kashmir, even in 32 years, this could not happen for Kashmiri Pandits. Any attempt to resettle them is denounced as a conspiracy to change the demographics.
It is not the intention of this article to tell the full story of the film. Because many people have directly watched the movie. It is also not its purpose to do newsprint reviews of the film. Because it is ultimately a film based on true events. It is natural to have factual ups and downs in the presentation. It's in it too. But the film is not one-sided.
On one occasion, she also criticizes Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a subdued tone and also exposes the political agenda of selective humanity in the intellectual jam. There may be a question on the timing of this film, why such a film has come or was brought now? The Hindutva agenda of BJP and RSS can also be smelled in this, but the basic question is, it is many times bigger and full of torture than these agendas. Vivek Agnihotri's direction is good.
All the actors, including not very big names, have done well. But in acting, Pallavi Joshi has played the role of leftist professor Radhika Menon. However, the level of sympathy tilts more in favor of Anupam Kher in the role of Kashmiri Pandit Pushkar Nath. He has lived up to his role.
In the end, the same question from where I started ie from that ticket window that what is important to remember such accidents and why is it necessary? So the answer is probably yes. Not only in favor of Kashmiri Pandits but also for all those races and religions who were forced out of their own country because of bigotry, cruelty and cruelty.
A message is clear through the film that if Hindus are a minority in their own state or country, then the cloak of secularism is automatically tarnished. The same thing happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan, now it is happening in Bangladesh. However, this does not mean that we should do the same. The film generates anger against the brutality of Islamic terrorists, but does not give the message of weighing all Muslims in one scale.
'The Kashmir Files' is not only a mere historical document of our own times, but it is also an iron hand shaking our sensibilities. There are also sharp sarcasm on the role of 'media' in the film.
Actually, in 1990, when all this was happening, then people like me were working in the media for five-seven years. He was also writing a lot of literature. But contemporary poetry, stories and novels echoed the pain of Kashmiri Pandits in an exceptional way. Because the valleys of Kashmir were far away from us as compared to the fields of Punjab, it may be some other country.
This was the period when Khalistani militancy in Punjab was making brutal remarks even before Kashmir. When I perused my memory, I found that with the sensitivity with which the news of terrorism in Punjab was published, Kashmiri terrorism and bigotry got very little space. Because there were no readers of those newspapers in the Kashmir Valley and for most
Kashmiri Pandits becoming refugees in their own country was like seasonal displaced due to floods in a river. He was sympathetic to some political parties like the BJP, but he did not fit into the political agenda of other parties, nor was he suitable for the news market.
The real question that remains unsolved even after 'The Kashmir Files' is whether Kashmiri Pandits will ever really get justice? Or will he continue to be used politically and will continue to tell his painful story when asked by someone? To find answers to these questions, we also have to go through the files of political intent.
