It rarely happens that the ghastly persecution faced by one community strikes the collective consciousness of a nation and invites unanimous condemnation at an unmatched scale by the morally upright citizenry. Sometimes years and years of activism, advocacy, commentary and documentation fail to comprehensively mobilise public opinion, whereas, on other occasions, even a spark is enough to inspire people to raise their voices in unison.
In the context of the genocide of the Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) and the subsequent exodus of the Hindu minority community from the valley, it was more than three decades later that a piece of cinematic genius, made with an unrelenting determination to showcase hard-hitting facts, created ripples in the entire country like never before.
The Kashmir Files (TKF) movie made by the audacious filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has brought a gigantic focus on the history of infliction of Islamic terror on KPs and the ordeal the community had to go through in its aftermath. From the conscientious Hindus living in India and spread globally to the Pandit community itself to no lesser figure than the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi - Agnihotri’s masterpiece has earned massive accolades for presenting an uncompromised version of the bloodbath that claimed scores of innocent KP lives.
image source : english.jagran.com
Amid the fascinating support received by TKF, the lobby has maintained its reputation of being repugnant to anything that advocates the Hindu cause by questioning the legitimacy of the thought and purpose behind making the movie.
The brazenly insensitive manner in which the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal along with his party members ridiculed TKF, and unlike the several BJP-ruled states refused to make the film tax free in the national capital, displays the enormous apathy of the left-liberal political class maintained for decades towards the KP community and the Hindus at large. The obnoxious guffawing by Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party legislators on the floor of the Delhi Legislative Assembly was tantamount to mocking the multiple gut-wrenching stories of the KP massacre and the tales of immense struggle along with unimaginable endurance exhibited by the Pandits post exodus.
On the other hand are the mainstream politicians of the valley with separatist leanings for whom TKF has come like a bolt from the blue. The repeated attempts by the Gupkar lobby to discredit the film as a piece of propaganda, aimed at besmirching Kashmiri Muslims and creating communal disharmony, have proved to be royally unproductive.
The more the lobby has tried to trash the factual incidents of ethnic cleansing depicted in the film, the stronger has been the response of the Indian public in terms of embracing TKF as a medium to understand the horrid past of the Kashmiri Pandits.
Finally, the pseudo-secular united political opposition and the so-called secular civil society in Delhi and elsewhere, which went ranting and raving about TKF being a venture to create a Hindu-Muslim divide in the country, have been left red-faced thanks to the tremendous response the movie has received from individuals, communities and groups alike.
image source : dnaindia.com
The fact of the matter is that instead of celebrating Agnihotri’s fearless endeavour to awaken India about the gory details of the KP genocide, the lobby tried to obfuscate the discourse by giving it a spin that absurdly portrays the massive attention garnered by TKF as a threat to India's secular fabric.
It must serve as a reality check for all Hindus and true secularists of this nation that any instance of activism or a piece of intellectual creation, which triggers a debate around the injustice, coercion and hounding faced by the Hindu community, is consciously tried to be sabotaged by the lobby.
Time to awaken on our own
While this is the time to feel grateful about TKF having brought unprecedented focus in more than three decades on the KP genocide, this also happens to be a crucial juncture for us to introspect and deeply so. The introspection ought to be done to ascertain why it took an art form to create a stir in the Indian minds with regard to the ghosts of Islamic terror that were unleashed on Hindus in the valley in the late 80s and the early 90s.
Had Vivek Agnihotri not mustered the courage to apprise the world of the stark realities of religious victimisation that the Pandit community was subjected to, would the deafening silence around it across political and social ecosystems have continued as it did for several years?
image source : youtube.com
This is an opportune moment to be constructively self-critical and come together as a society to make an earnest admission that it is worrisome if it takes a movie to jolt us into becoming a morally and historically aware citizenry. It is indicative of a concerning mental dormancy at a societal level that requires an external force to end the state of oblivion vis-a-vis past incidents of religion-based targeted killings.
The Kashmir Files movie has not only delivered momentous enlightenment on the stark realities of oppression faced by Kashmiri Hindus but has also rendered an important lesson for us to shun our dependence on artists, activists and the public figures for creating revolutionary awakenings around the history of carnage such as the KP genocide.
The same holds for the Indian polity too. The Modi government, and the governments of the BJP-ruled states by virtue of awarding the movie a tax-free status, have shown the perfect gesture of giving TKF the kind of recognition that it deserved so that the message echoes far and wide across India’s political and social landscape.
By all means, now is the time to resurrect the faith of the Kashmiri Pandits and give them the unwavering belief that despite so many years having passed justice will be delivered and their lost pride will be restored.
