Political gains blind many people. Some glamourise their opportunistic mindset and some make the most of their drama skills. Some build bungalows and buy cars, and lands. Some wear below-average clothing to showcase simplicity but load their bed cabinets, wardrobes and flush tanks with prosperity. We have seen many leaders who sucked energy and peace out of our country but created false images about themselves. Once Sarojini Naidu said, ” It takes a lot of money to keep Gandhi poor,” we can now say that “it takes a lot of blood and lives to keep Mamta secular.” Is it worth it?
Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri has been passionate not just about his filmmaking but also about the cause to that he seems to be dedicated. He has served West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with a legal notice today, May 9, for her disparaging comments about his film “The Kashmir Files.” He published a copy of the warning on his official Twitter account. The notice stated that “you made statements before media, which were telecasted and broadcast on several television channels and newspapers, wherein you called the said movie a “conspiracy” and that it is mostly fiction and planned. You had tweeted the same thing and made a remark on the assembly floor without mentioning the movie and added that there is a plot to stir up trouble and that the movie was funded and produced to create unrest. Additionally, you advised the audience not to see the film.” Mamta Banerjee sounds like a Zakir Naik fan and speaks like him. She also gives wrong references like him and shuts down people who try to show her the reality. Zakir Naik once said Kashmir will become Palestine soon !.” It’s time all those who think or suggest in this direction should be thrown out of the country or jailed. Mamta Devi needs to change her mentors.
According to Vivek Agnihotri’s legal notice, Mamata Banerjee’s comments seriously damaged the director’s reputation and hurt the movie’s financial performance at the box office. After the announcement of his 2024 film, “The Delhi Files,” Trinamool Congress (TMC) employees began harassing the director and threatening him. It also emphasised the postponement of Vivek Agnihotri’s book signing in Kolkata. Vivek Agnihotri said in his legal notice that Mamata Banerjee had wrongly accused him of defaming Kashmiri people and had made unfounded claims that the BJP had funded his film. It stressed that “all of my client’s hard work, dedication, honesty, and appreciation have been damaged with the stroke of a single statement made by you, bringing a bad name to the movie and my clients and the same is irreparable.” The court notification demanded that Mamata Banerjee either provide authenticated evidence to support her allegations or issue a full apology and retract her false claims. The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story were described as “distorted movies” by West Bengal’s chief minister on Monday, May 8.
She asserted, “If the political party play with fire, casteism, or divide and rule…,” at a news conference at Nabanna (the State Secretariat). Why are there “Kashmir Files”? to make one group feel bad? This Kerala File: What is it? Despite this, I do not support the CPI (M) because it collaborates with the BJP. “I’m referring to the ones…It was their (CPIM’s) responsibility to criticise it, not mine. The Kerala Files is being aired by the BJP. A fabricated narrative,” Banerjee bragged. The West Bengal Chief Minister continued by claiming that the BJP, which had been to Bengal to promote “The Kerala Story,” had funded the cast of the film. She implied that filmmakers wouldn’t hesitate to produce films like Kashmir Files that purportedly “condemn” Kashmiris. “What is wrong with people? We value each individual. We have a constitution like that. They are currently disparaging the state and the people of Kerala. Their story aims to malign the Bengal as well, Mamata” Banerjee said.
Mamta Banerjee conveniently prefers to be an amnesia patient and forgets facts and the history of the country. The 1989 violence in Kashmir that led to the exodus of the Kashmiri Hindu population was brought to light in the movie “The Kashmir Files,” which transports viewers back to that year. Since the film’s release in theatres, it has come under fire from the left-liberal cabal and politicians who claim it appeases minorities. They attempted to discredit the film by claiming that the real-life events that were depicted in it were the product of the director’s imagination.
Vivek Agnihotri’s notice will make Mamta take some history lessons and know more about the plight of the Kashmiri Hindus she is trying to insult by condemning the movie that expresses their hardships and reality. They have not got their justice yet. Justice needs to be demanded and thankfully we have artists and filmmakers now who can stand tall and collaborate art and reality. His rendezvous with Lady Zakir Naik is going to be challenging but most satisfying as all those who try to pull down India perish. Best wishes to the gutsy director for making the film and standing by it every time needed without any fears.
Know what the Reality of Kashmir Files:
‘The Kashmir Files’ movie has made thousands of people realise the harsh reality of Kashmir and the brutal genocide that had been converted up or denied for all these years. Some even are finding it hard to accept that the movie is based on true stories and that the victims of the episode were never heard. The dialogues of the movie like – “The truth of Kashmir is so true that people may find it unbelievable”, “Broken people don’t speak, they just need to be heard”, “This is a huge war of information, narratives”, have shaken the widely held notions established by decades of whitewashing and denials.
The movie transports viewers to 1989, when a significant conflict broke out in Kashmir as a result of growing Islamic Jihad, driving the vast majority of Hindus from the valley. According to estimates, an estimated 100,000 of the valley’s 140,000 Kashmiri Pandit residents left during February and March 1990. In the years that followed, more of them left, and by 2011, only roughly 3,000 families were still living in the valley. The 1990 episode, when Farooq Abdullah, the then-chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, submitted his resignation, is where the film, which is based on video interviews with first-generation Kashmiri Pandit victims of the Kashmir Genocide, begins. Abdullah lost power in 1984, most likely following his participation in a convention in Kashmir where Yasin Malik, the head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), also spoke. Later, Ghulam Mohammad Shah, who was backed by the Congress party, took over as state chief minister in place of his brother-in-law Farooq Abdullah.
The Congress party, which supported Shah’s government, is accused of advancing the Islamist agenda in the Valley. Under Shah’s control, the Islamists were given political sway; Hindu temples were set on fire, mosques were erected in their place, and signs declaring that “Islam is in danger” were erected. The state was put under President’s rule in 1986 when Congress dropped its backing for the Shah-led administration. In addition, the President’s reign was overthrown in November after the infamous Rajiv-Farooq deal made it possible for the NC-Congress alliance to seize control of the government. The state is now mired in uncertainty as a result of the second swearing-in of the coalition administration led by Farooq Abdullah.
According to reports, the administration under Sheikh Abdullah renamed some 300 areas in Kashmir with Islamic names in the 1980s, signalling the start of Jammu and Kashmir’s Islamization. Since then, Kashmiri Hindus have been specifically targeted and referred to as “Mukhbirs,” or Indian military informants. They were listed on the terrorist organisations with an Islamist agenda’s target list. The family of Pushkar Nath Pandit, played by actor Anupam Kher, is the focus of the movie “The Kashmir Files.” Their son is put on a hit list and assassinated by terrorists, their daughter-in-law is murdered in the open, and their grandchild is shot in the head. The audience is left wondering how people can be so cruel to one another in the name of faith after witnessing the suffering of the family in the film. Here are nine events that were portrayed in the film along with their causes. A scene from the film depicts the terrified Hindu community of the Kashmir Valley after a Srinagar High Court judge was assassinated in broad sight. This is from November 1989, when terrorists shot retired Judge Nilakanth Ganjoo, a Kashmiri Pandit, in the open air in Maharaj Bazaar, Amira Kadal. After he found JKLF leader Maqbool Bhat responsible for the murder of Amar Chand, a CID police sub-inspector of the Jammu and Kashmir Police who lived in the Nadihal hamlet of the Baramulla area, Justice Ganjoo came under observation.
Nearly twenty years later, JKLF commander Yasin Malik admitted to killing Justice Ganjoo in an interview with the BBC Hard Talk. Malik was overheard claiming that Justice Nilkanth Ganjoo had been shot by the JKLF as he had declared the execution of Maqbool Bhat. The outfit reportedly also killed Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, a lawyer by profession and the head of the BJP’s Kashmir Chapter, earlier in September 1989, according to the reports. The horrific deaths of two prominent Kashmiri Pandit community members cast doubt on the state of law and order throughout the community. The anxious Hindus had begun to worry a great deal about their safety. The movie portrays the pressures to flee Kashmir’s valley that the Hindu community has faced as a result of growing Islamic terrorism and radicalism well. The Kashmir Files incident in which Muslim women and young children purposefully harass Hindu women causes sorrow and agony in the viewers. The Hindu community lacked access to necessities like food and water for survival. The Kashmiri Hindu women were not allowed to enter any markets in the valley to buy food. Additionally, Hindus who organised for the grains or established grocery stores for the neighbourhood were either slain or threatened with expulsion.
In the film, a young child, probably between the ages of 5 and 7, is seen reciting anti-Hindu chants. He yells “Al Safa, Hindu Dafa” as Hindu women scream in pain in front of a diplomat’s (Mithun Chakraborty) automobile. When Srinagar-based newspapers Aftab and Al Safa reported the Islamist group Hizbul Mujahideen threats threatening all Hindus to leave Kashmir immediately, the scenario was once again a real pick with a little bit of cinematic licence from the year 1990. Popular Srinagar-based Urdu newspaper Al Safa twisted no words when advising the Pandits to leave the valley as soon as possible if they wished to preserve their lives and honour. A plethora of warnings of the same kind has been muddled by loudspeakers mounted on mosque roofs. Demonstrators enraged by rage, hatred, and retaliation were seen in the streets carrying out anti-Indian protests. The terrified Pandits were unable to discover any source that could guarantee them at least the protection of life. It became commonplace to see wall posters with rather large fonts around the Valley referring to Kashmir as the “Islamic Republic of Kashmir.” Even Radio Kashmir’s newscast listed the names of the Kashmiri Pandits killed by terrorists every day.
Yasin Malik opened fire with 40 bullets on the Indian Air Force men waiting for their vehicle at the Rawalpora bus station on January 25, 1990. Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna, Corporal DB Singh, Corporal Uday Shankar, and Airman Azad Ahmad were all members of the Indian Air Force. Ten other IAF members also sustained injuries. According to sources, two to three automatic weapons and one semi-automatic handgun were used to fire rounds in front of one head constable and seven other constables from the Jammu and Kashmir Police stations, who remained still. A senior journalist is shown in the Kashmir Files posing at the “Kashmir news” and defending the terrible murder of Kashmiri Hindus. According to the footage, “the Kashmiri Pandits, though in the minority, were trying to snatch the benefits of the Kashmiri Muslims and so were forced to flee the state.”
The scene is a pertinent selection from 2004, when ‘liberal’ journalist Barkha Dutt contextualised the genocidal killing of Kashmiri Pandits. In the video, Barkha Dutt was heard discussing how the Kashmiri Pandits were quite well-off and had respectable employment. She continues by saying that the majority of Muslims eventually became resentful as a result. In 2004, after almost ten years as a journalist, Barkha Dutt hosted a programme called “Kashmiri Pandits: The Forgotten Minority” in which she opened the programme with footage of the Kashmiri Pandits’ destroyed colonies and audio clips from the persecuted Hindus. “What all this has bred is a violent and relentless hatred,” she later remarked. Over the years, relations between Hindus and Muslims have endured on a personal level, but the state’s politics are wholly divided along religious lines. Some claim that voting would be conducted along religious lines in a plebiscite in Kashmir today, making it worse than division. Barkha Dutt publicly supported Kashmiri separatists who sought to hold Governor Jagmohan accountable for the genocide when she spoke of the “friendship between Hindus and Muslims” and “Politics of hate ruining that friendship.” The programme was an effort to protect religious hatred and killers like Yasin Malik of the JKLF.
Nobody brought up the fact that the Hindu community’s relative economic success was largely the result of their investment in education, which led to them landing well-paying jobs. Farooq Abdullah, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, is accused of cultivating close ties with Yasin Malik, the leader of the JKLF, to maintain political control over Kashmir while attempting to Islamize it. His resignation was accepted, but that didn’t do much to stop Islamists from calling for an “Azad Kashmir.” Despite Malik’s ties to terrorism, former administrations and the left-liberal media establishment tried to present him as the Kashmiris’ saviour and a symbol of peace. In a conference that was organised in Kashmir, Abdullah and Malik had the same platform. Abdullah claimed that he had gone to the conference on behalf of the Congress Party to understand the opinions of the group. As depicted in the movie, ‘intellectuals’ and people in positions of authority gave their tacit support and encouragement to terrorists like Yasin Malik. It is significant to remember that Manmohan Singh, the then prime minister, had invited Malik to a meeting at his official house in New Delhi in the year 2006. As part of his vital outreach programme with the political leaders, separatists, and other groups in Jammu & Kashmir, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also spoke with terrorists. One of the most horrifying photos in recent memory is that of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cheerfully embracing the terrorist Yasin Malik.
In addition, Malik had met Arundhati Roy, a leading advocate on the far left for inciting Kashmiri youth to wage war against the Indian state. In the movie “The Kashmir Files,” actress Pallavi Joshi plays the part of one of the so-called “intellectuals,” in which she is seen interacting with terrorists in the form of Roy in real life. She uses phrases like “Sarkar to unki hai lekin system Hamara hai (It’s our system and their government)” in her dialogues, demonstrating how tightly the ‘Left-liberal’ ecology has been woven into the fabric of the government. It is noteworthy that Abdullah recently stated that the Kashmiri people “do not feel or want to be Indian” and that they would prefer to be dominated by China rather than India following the abrogation of Article 370 from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Additionally, the government’s intention to repeal Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 was denounced by the Congress party in India. The sequence in the Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri-directed movie where a lady is made to force-feed rice that has been stained with her husband’s blood is among its most heartbreaking moments. This is a reenactment of a terrible killing that took place in 1990 when terrorists went in pursuit of engineer BK Ganjoo, who had sheltered in a rice barrel. If his whereabouts hadn’t been revealed to the terrorists by his neighbours, he would still be alive today. The terrorists shot him dead by firing several shots at the rice barrel, causing the blood to stream from the container. The wife of Ganjoo was then made to eat the blood-soaked rice.
As was already noted, the story of one family’s suffering during the genocide in Kashmir in 1990 is the focus of the movie “The Kashmir Files.” Pushkar Nath Pandit’s (Anupam Kher) Hindu neighbour’s daughter-in-law is seen being undressed and beaten in front of onlookers. In actuality, though, numerous Kashmiri Pandit women were abducted, raped, and killed. Islamists in Kashmir have made it clear in their slogans that they prefer their womenfolk above Pandit men in “their Kashmir.” Hindu women were forced to witness horrendous acts as the level of Islamic militancy and terrorism in the area increased. They were repeatedly sexually assaulted by several Islamic jihadists who claimed to have higher moral standards. The murder of Sharda, Pandit’s daughter-in-law, shocks the audience in the film. The jihadists are seen handing her over to the mechanical saw machine while she is still alive, chopping her directly through the centre of her body. In actuality, Girija Tickoo experienced this in June 1990. Tickoo was a Bandipora-born Hindu Kashmiri who worked as a lab assistant at a Kashmir Valley institution. Following the ‘Azadi Movement’ by the JKLF, commanded by Yasin Malik, Tickoo and her family fled and eventually settled in Jammu. Someone called her one day and said she could come back to get her pay because things were better in the valley. She had a guarantee of her safety, and the source claimed it was okay to travel there.
When Girija arrived in the valley to pick up her paycheck on June 4th, 1990, she met her Muslim coworker at her house. She had no idea that jihadi militants were watching her every move. Girija was abducted hostage and taken to an unidentified location from her coworker’s home. Everyone, including her coworkers and locals, passively observed her being kidnapped. Her deceased body was discovered on the side of the road in terrible condition a few days after the kidnapping. She had been tormented and viciously gang-raped, the autopsy indicated. Girija was still alive when she was chopped in half from the centre of her body with a mechanical saw. Like the thousands of other Kashmiri Pandits whose suffering has been demonised as “propaganda” by the “liberal” wing of the media and society, her family is still waiting for justice.
Another sequence, in which Vivek Agnihotri reenacts the massacre at the Jammu and Kashmir village of Nadimarg, horrifies spectators by showing Hindus being shot one by one at point-blank range. On March 23, 2003, Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists killed 24 Hindu Kashmiri Pandits in the village of Nadimarg in the Pulwama District of Jammu & Kashmir. Armed insurgents who appeared in fake military garb pulled Hindus from their houses, lined them up, and opened fire on them with automatic guns. The victims, who included 11 men, 11 women, and 2 little children, ranged in age from 65 to 2 years old. The police officers stationed there left the area. The murderers desecrated the victims’ bodies, pillaged their homes, and stole the jewellery from the dead women’s bodies. Unquestionably, The Kashmir Files is a great account of the harsh facts about Kashmiri Pandits that took nearly 32 years to come to light.
Don’t let big names fool you. Trust reality. Do read the copy of the notice attached. Jai Hind.
