Bollywood’s hyperbole related to Kashmir is an affront to the truth
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Set in Indian-administered Kashmir, the recently-released Bollywood movie, ‘The Kashmir Files,’ given its context, has engendered febrile controversy in India. High-octane arguments have been made on both sides of the fence.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also commented on the film, showering it with praise and 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 favor of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A former chief minister of Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, has called the movie ‘a pack of lies.’
The movie’s storyline revolves around two basic themes. One, that a “genocide” of Kashmiri Pandits (Kashmiri Hindus) took place which led to their exodus from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. Two, that there is no legitimate struggle for self-determination in Kashmir, only ‘terrorism’ continuously 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 a 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.”
It is not difficult to establish through fact and historical data that nothing of the above ever happened to the Kashmiri Pandits. There is no denying that some Pandit families went through difficult times, but to claim that there were plans to carry out a systematic genocide of Kashmiri Pandits holds no water.
The movie claims that 4,000 Hindus were killed by ‘militants’ and that over 300,000 were forced to leave the Valley, while the government’s official statistics say the entire population of Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley was no more than 150,000 in 1989!
One cannot agree more with Prime Minister Modi when he says the truth must be told. And the truth is this: No genocide of Kashmiri Pandits ever took place.
Abdul Basit
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 220. In those years, a majority of the Pandits were forced to leave the valley, but 2000-3000 families decided to stay put. Then, what genocide?
‘The Kashmir Files’ may be a great Bollywood flick, but one replete with damaging misrepresentations, in essence a propaganda movie that inflicts a false narrative and leads audience members to believe the same. It is high time for Bollywood-- the world’s biggest film industry-- 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 the Pandits had decided to leave their homeland. They should have stayed on, they said.
The late Syed Ali Shah Geelani 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, with Kashmiri leaders taking full responsibility for the security of their fellow-Hindu Kashmiris.
However, they never endorsed building separate settlements for Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley which they believed would only work to create more inter-communal chasms rather than strengthening ‘Kashmiri-ness’ or 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 Pandits now either settled in Jammu or in India are reluctant to return.
The fact of the matter remains that it is Kashmir’s Muslims who are at this time facing a genocidal situation in Kashmir. As documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and human rights organizations, close to 100,000 Kashmiri Muslims have lost their lives. The presence of over 800,000 Indian security personnel with laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Public Safety Act and Disturbed Areas Act, give untrammelled powers to kill Kashmiri Muslims with impunity.
Moreover, New Delhi has been working since August 2019, to engineer demographic changes in Jammu and Kashmir to turn 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 access to their investigation teams to the area.
One cannot agree more with Prime Minister Modi when he says the truth must be told. And the truth is this: No genocide of Kashmiri Pandits ever took place.
Bollywood’s incorrigible hyperbole when it comes to film-making about Kashmir or Pakistan is harmful to the cause of that truth and to democracy.
- Abdul Basit is DG, Islamabad Centre for Regional Studies. He was previously Pakistan ambassador to Germany and Pakistan High Commissioner for India.
Twitter: @abasitpak1
