‘The Kashmir Files’

Set in the Indian-occupied Kashmir, the recently-released Bollywood movie, The Kashmir Files, given its context, has engendered febrile controversy in India. High-voltage arguments are being made on both sides of the fence. When emotions are high, there is little room even to decently hear each other out.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi too could not help but comment on the film. In a speech, he was all praise for the movie, underlining that the truth must be brought out no matter what. On the other hand, some Congress and Kashmiri politicians are upbraiding the movie for “distorting” the past and presenting a politically skewed narrative in favour of the ruling BJP. A former chief minister of Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, called the movie “a pack of lies”.

The movie’s storyline revolves around two basic themes. One, a “genocide” of Kashmiri Pandits took place which led to their exodus from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. Two, there is no legitimate struggle for self-determination in Kashmir but “terrorism” that continues to be backed by Pakistan.

“Genocide” is indeed a very strong word. Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide.

It is not difficult to establish that nothing of the above had happened to Kashmiri Pandits. There is no gainsaying that some Pandit families would have gone through difficult times but to claim that there were plans to carry out a systematic genocide of Kashmiri Pandits is something that holds no water whatsoever.

While the movie claims that 4,000 Hindus were killed by “militants” and that more than 300,000 were forced to leave the Valley, these figures do not tessellate even with the government official statistics. According to the latter, the population of Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley was no more than 150,000 in 1989.

When the armed conflict began, the Pandits did come under pressure. According to the Indian Home Affairs Ministry, the number of Pandits who died in the conflict from 1990 to 1994 was no more than 220. While the majority of the Pandits during those years were forced to leave the Valley, two to three thousand families decided to stay put. One wonders if this could be termed genocide.

The Kashmir File might be a great Bollywood flick, it goes without saying that the movie is replete with misrepresentations. It is in essence a propaganda movie like so many others before it. It is high time for Bollywood to remove its blinkers when it comes to Kashmir and Pakistan.

During my stint in New Delhi as Pakistan High Commissioner (2014-2017), the subject of Kashmiri Pandits would often come up in my conversations with top Kashmiri leaders. Without any exception, they would bemoan the fact that Kashmiri Pandits had decided to leave their homeland. They should have stayed on. After all Kashmiri Muslims were also in the line of fire but they never abandoned their homes.

Umpteen times, Syed Ali Shah Geelani (late) had publicly stated that Kashmiri Pandits were integral to the Kashmiri cultural mosaic. They must return to the Valley and live side by side with Kashmiri Muslims. The Kashmiri leaders would also take full responsibility for the security of their fellow Hindu Kashmiris.

However, they would not endorse building separate settlements for Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley which they believe would only work to create more inter-communal chasms rather than strengthening “Kashmiriness” and promoting inter-cultural harmony.

The BJP government has been working since 2015 to build 6,000 residential units for Kashmiri Pandits. So far only a thousand or so units have been built but the Kashmiri Pandits — either settled in Jammu or in India — are now mostly reluctant to return.

The fact of the matter remains that it is Kashmiri Muslims who are facing the genocidal situation in Kashmir. As documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and several other human rights organisations, close to 100,000 Kashmiri Muslims have lost their lives. The presence of over 800,000 Indian security personnel, along with laws such as Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Public Safety Act and Disturbed Areas Act, provide untrammeled powers to kill Kashmiri Muslims with impunity.

Moreover, New Delhi has also been working — since Jammu and Kashmir was illegally stripped of its special status and split into two Union Territories on 5 August 2019 — to engineer demographic changes in Jammu and Kashmir turning it into a Hindu majority region. India has also rejected the 2018 and 2019 reports on Kashmir by the UN Human Rights Commissioner even denying them to send an investigation team to the Indian-occupied Kashmir.

One cannot agree more with Prime Minister Modi when he says the truth must be told. Would he be amenable, besides a movie on the 1984 Emergency, to films telling the truth, not “alternative facts”, on the 1992 demolition of the Babri Mosque and what happened to nearly two thousand Muslims in Gujarat under his watch in 2002?

No genocide of Kashmiri Pandits ever took place. One cannot help Bollywood’s incorrigible hyperbole when a film is about Kashmir or Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 23^rd, 2022.

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