The Kashmir Files

Even propaganda deserves a better standard than Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files. The last half an hour of the movie is pathetically propagandist with sermons of all sorts. The concluding frames left me nauseated. No, there was absolutely no need to show every single one of those murders. Especially that little child’s. Not so unaesthetically, at least. Cinema is an art, Agnihotri bhai, not an insipid ad for your pet ideology.

The first half had some good drama. I thought I made the right decision to watch the movie though none of the reviews I had read gave me any reason to make the decision. Soon drama gave way to blood-curdling scenes. Violence of all sorts. Terrorist violence on the one hand and violence on art on the other. If the Muslim terrorists in Kashmir committed the former, Agnihotri’s direction did the latter.

The word ‘narrative’ is mentioned again and again in the movie especially toward the end. The Kashmir Files is a narrative and little more. It is a narrative created by a right-wing Hindu propagandist. Everyone who is not a right-wing Hindu is a villain in the movie – as well as outside, by insinuation. All Muslims are murderers or crooks. All liberals are caricatures who have devious and dubious faces. Secularism is filthy. In fact, Agnihotri goes to the extent of hammering down the narrative that the terrorists in Kashmir and the liberals in ANU (JNU?) work hand in glove with each other.

The protagonist is a mere puppet in Agnihotri’s hands. Krishna Pandit (Darshan Kumar) was born in Kashmir but was brought up outside as his parents and brother were among the numerous Pandits killed by terrorists. Everyone except Krishna knows the truth about him. Krishna appears to be too innocent – to the extent of appearing naïve if not foolish – until he learns too much in too little time. He blindly trusts Prof Radhika Menon, the liberal caricature of ANU, and then the leader of the terrorists with whom Radhika is seen in a photograph. Then when the character of Mithun Chakraborty delivers another narrative, he laps up that. And after all that, this masoon ladka suddenly comes up with encyclopaedic knowledge about India’s great heritage and the monstrous Muslim villainy that had swallowed up all that heritage for a long time. In that moment of the protagonist’s epiphany, we get a long sermon from him, a moral science class that can beat PM Modi’s Mann ki Baat.

“Some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions.” That’s what The Kashmir Files is in the end. The verdict belongs to Anuj Kumar of The Hindu. Shailesh Kapoor, founder-CEO of Ormax Media says that the movie caters “to a right-wing sensibility in sync with the current mood of the nation.”

The current mood of the nation has made the movie tax-free in the BJP-ruled states. The BJP will reap political dividends from this movie which promotes hatred without limits. Hatred, aversion, revulsion… such are the tastes that linger in your sensibility as you walk out of the movie hall having watched The Kashmir Files.

PM Modi with the movie's crew

Art should produce the opposite kind of feelings. Art is a purification of our negative feelings and reinforcement of positive ones. The Kashmir Files achieves just the opposite.