Opinion Why they love to hate ‘The Kashmir Files’

Alas, those of us who are directly involved in meeting the internal security challenges of India cannot afford the luxury of indulging in these flights of fancy about the very real challenges to the idea of India posed by the conflict in Kashmir — a conflict that’s grown out of more than seven decades of festering separatism based on unchecked ethnic and religious chauvinism. After three decades of bloody conflict, this separatism has now dropped all pretence of being anything other than a front for the ideology of Jihadi terrorism. It is an assault on not just the territorial integrity of India, but also on the very idea of India as an inclusive, tolerant and liberal society. It is this assault on the idea of India that is depicted in the movie. But our left-liberals are so fixated on the threat to secularism from the Hindu Right, that they have a complete blind spot when it comes to acknowledging even the possibility that secularism in India faces a far graver challenge from Islamic fundamentalism, of which the conflict in Kashmir is the most egregious example.

Do we term the violence and displacement experienced by the Kashmiri Pandits as genocide? Compared to the very recent examples of the Jewish Holocaust and the massacre of Armenians by Turks, in the 20th Century, it is certainly a misnomer. However, it still represents a very brazen and brutal example of ethnic cleansing. Much has been made by those attacking the film about the failure of successive governments to ensure justice and rehabilitation for the displaced Kashmiri Pandits. But again there is a complete silence about the ideology of hate that allowed this persecution and displacement in the first place, an ideology that has peddled lies about Kashmiriyat to create a self-serving narrative of conspiracy and victimhood.

Let’s be honest, Kashmiriyat was always a bit of a fantasy. The recorded history of Kashmir since medieval times is full of examples of mass conversions based on political coercion and brute force. What happened to the Pandits in the 1990s was nothing abnormal or anomalous. Our Kashmiri Muslim citizens and leftist intellectuals are in collective denial to pretend that what happened to the Pandits in Kashmir in the 1990s was a diabolical plot by the then Government of India to defame Kashmiriyat. Are we to believe that lakhs of Kashmiri Pandits faked their persecution and willingly left their livelihoods and homes to take part in an enormous charade to malign the Muslims of Kashmir? One would have to be exceptionally gullible, or paranoid, or plain twisted to peddle this narrative.

There is a tone that the film takes that is jarring even to every proud Hindu who is a patriotic Indian. It is the belief that not a single Kashmiri Muslim resisted the dominant narrative of hatred. I cannot believe that even in the middle of that collective madness, there weren’t a few Kashmiri Schindlers.

The violence against the Pandits in Kashmir was not just something carried out by a few fringe terrorists. It had the tacit support of large sections of the political class and the civil society of the Valley. It is this tacit support that prevents the return of the Pandits to Kashmir. Unless the now almost completely Muslim-dominated civil society in the Kashmir Valley questions its own twisted narrative, acknowledges its complicity in the plight of the Pandits, and weans off its addiction to victimhood and Jihadi separatism, peace isn’t coming anytime soon to Kashmir.

The popularity of The Kashmir Files must also be seen in the larger context of the broad public support for the dismantling, in August 2019, of the special constitutional status of Kashmir that was based on Articles 35A and 370. The Constitution of India merely codifies our secular ideals. They actually draw sustenance from centuries of cultural syncretism that is at the heart of Hindu philosophy and culture. It was this syncretic core that was truly damaged by the persecution of Kashmiri Pandits and their displacement. Acknowledgement of this fact, as this film does with typical Bollywood hyperbole, is essential to any credible idea of India as well as to any viable roadmap to ending the conflict in Kashmir.

Our largely left-liberal elite has long argued that secularism in India faces an existential threat from the Hindu Right. For many decades post Independence, this position went largely unchallenged in both politics, and in our larger public discourse. It is being challenged in both domains now. This is what happens when outdated ideologies fail to adapt to ground realities. Vivek Agnihotri is certainly no Satyajit Ray or even Manmohan Desai. Nonetheless, denouncing the popularity of The Kashmir Files as another example of popular sentiment being misled and misfed by Hindutva forces is predictable. It is another chapter in being intellectually tone-deaf to the political and cultural realities of today’s India.

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 16, 2022 under the title ‘Misreading The Kashmir Files’. The writer is an IPS officer serving currently in Uttarakhand. Views are personal