The Kashmir Files, written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri and produced by Zee Studios, has been criticized for a variety of reasons—a propaganda film for the Bharatiya Janata Party, instigating Hindus against Muslims, distortion and misrepresentation of facts, and so on. But it is surprising that nobody has criticized it for what it undoubtedly is—a boring, too long film that taxes the patience of watchers with a huge amount of propaganda. It is like watching BJP spokesman Sambit Patra’s harangues and homilies translated into a 170-minute movie.
The attitude is best reflected in an answer that Agnihotri gave to a question posed by a Hindustan Times reporter: “On being asked if he would like to say anything to those who have been slamming the film, Vivek simply said, ‘Why should I say anything to terrorists’?”
Which makes me, as I slam it as crude and crass propaganda, a terrorist.
Such self-righteousness breathes in almost every frame of the movie. Only Agnihotri and his cheerleaders in politics and the media know the truth about Kashmir and Kashmiri pundits; only Agnihotri & Co are honest, and everybody else is deceitful. The administration, academia, police (that is, in the dark ages before 2014), media—everybody is guilty, as they just watched the ethnic cleansing of the pundits.
Agnihotri was so busy in furthering the BJP’s agenda that he even forgot to tell the real story: the slow but steady Islamization of Kashmir that prepared the ground for the ethnic cleansing of the pundits.
Way back in June 1982, Karan Singh, an independent MP and son of state’s last maharaja Hari Singh, had prophesied this. Responding to Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Islamist rant at Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine, he said, “Basically, it is oversimplifying things to say the Sheikh’s actions are electoral gimmicks. Something more serious is brewing. If this kind of thing goes on, and aggressive and proselytizing Islam is advocated, there will be a backlash.”
Keen to focus on the ghoulish and cruel behavior of terrorists, Agnihotri has failed miserably to put the ethnic cleansing in its proper perspective. The movie has fine, award-winning actors like Anupam Kher and Mithun Chakraborty. The former managed to perform well, but the latter oscillated between underacting and overacting. But then if a film is bad, not even the greatest actors can redeem it—and TKF is certainly a bad film.
The best performance was by Pallavi Joshi, while Darshan Kumar was also impressive.
In several scenes, the characters looked like speaking at the programmes organized by RSS front organizations. While I was watching the long speech Kumar delivers towards the end of the film, I was reminded of the sermons BJP leaders regularly deliver on news channels. It felt like enduring Sambit Patra. The worst part was that I paid for the torture!