SIKAR, India – A group of boys play cricket on a snowy field in Kashmir, a war-torn Muslim-majority region between India and Pakistan.
As the boys play, they listen to radio commentary in the background about a professional cricket match between arch-rivals India and Pakistan. When one of the boys, a Hindu named Shiva, applauds the famous Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, he is beaten for doing so, and his abusers force him to sing, “Long live Pakistan, down with Hindustan!”
This opening scene sets the tone for “The Kashmir Files,” a film that has gone on to become an unexpected blockbuster, attracting millions of moviegoers across India and the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The film, which was released in March, is largely set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a group of militant Islamists forced Kashmiri pandits, higher-caste Hindus, from the region. It has been seized by the BJP as a tool to present its story of Hindu persecution in India, at a time of increasing calls for violence against India’s minority Muslims.
Employees of the Bharatiya Janata Party encourage members and supporters to attend, the cast and crew take pictures with Mr. Modi, and some states ruled by the party are offering tax breaks on ticket sales and days off to boost attendance .
“Those who haven’t seen it should watch the film to learn how atrocities and terror gripped Kashmir during the rule of Congress,” said Amit Shah, India’s home affairs minister, referring to one of India’s most important political parties and a rival to the BJP.
From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Kashmir was gripped by an insurgency led by militants seeking independence or union with neighboring Pakistan. According to a government report, about 65,000 families, mostly pandits, left the region in the early 1990s.
The region remained unsettled in the decades that followed, and in 2019 the government of Modi stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its long-held semi-autonomous status, split it into two federal territories administered by New Delhi, and deployed a heavy security presence. in the midst of a ban on free speech.
While the Indian government has insisted that its decision to remove Kashmir’s special status was intended to improve governance there and reduce militancy, the region has since experienced unrest and violence, sometimes deadly, with the killings by both militants and security forces.
Critics of the film, including opposition politicians and left-wing intellectuals and historians, have called the film “division” and “propaganda”, an attempt to sensationalize the murder of Cashmere pandits while avoiding violence against Muslims. In 1990, the peak year of the Pandit exodus, hundreds of Hindus and Muslims were murdered by militants.
Critics also say the film has given the BJP ammunition to widen the wedge between Hindus and Muslims.
AS Dulat, a former head of Indian intelligence and author of a book on Kashmir, said there was no doubt that pandits had been targeted by Islamist radicals. But he declined to watch the film, finding the message unhelpful and ill-timed.
“This film was made to unnecessarily polarize the nation, and Kashmir can do without it,” he said.
Many on the political right say rejecting the film is tantamount to shooting the messenger.
“This movie is special because the real cruelty suffered by Kashmiri Pandits has never been told in this unadulterated way,” said Gaurav Tiwari, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party that has arranged free tickets for moviegoers.
Mohit Bhan, a Pandit whose family home was burned during the eviction in 1993, said many in his community saw the film as a much-anticipated exploration of the period.
“Now that the pandits have come to believe that justice is hard to come by by successive governments, they think this movie is it,” said Mr. Bhan, whose party, the People’s Democratic Party, led Jammu and Kashmir in an alliance with Modi’s BJP before turning the state into a federal territory.
Though reactions to the film have been deeply divided along political and sectarian lines, its commercial success is indisputable: Despite the lack of song-and-dance numbers – a staple of Bollywood films – “The Kashmir Files” was an instant hit, grossing over $40 million to date, making it one of the biggest earners this year. It cost about $2 million to make.
Sandeep Yadav, a businessman in his early thirties, recently waited for the film in a shopping center in Sikar, a quiet farming village in the Indian state of Rajasthan.
Mr Yadav said he had previously heard on television what had happened to the Pandits, and that he rarely went to the cinema and instead relied on his mobile phone for a daily dose of entertainment.
But this film was a special occasion, he said before showing at a theater that completely sold out for “The Kashmir Files” in the first few weeks of its release.
“I had heard of pandits being evicted from their homes in the middle of the night,” he said. “I was curious about the subject and wanted to see this film, especially for that.”
Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, the director, said he created “The Kashmir Files” after collecting nearly 700 video testimonials from people who suffered directly during that period. He declined to say how many of them were Hindus or Muslims.
In an interview, Mr. Agnihotri said his goal with the film was to bring to light what he called the “genocide” inflicted on Pandits and his claim that left-wing academics, intellectuals and writers were complicit in covering up that history.
“All I am saying is to recognize that genocide has happened so that no one repeats it against Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Christians,” he said.
In both a 2018 book and interviews, Mr. Agnihotri railed against leftist student activists and intellectuals for supporting the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India, calling these so-called urban Naxalites “worse than terrorists.” He has also expressed his support for Yogi Adityanath, the burning Hindu monk who was recently re-elected as chief minister of India’s most populous state.
Some of Bollywood’s elite have praised the film. Ram Gopal Varma, a director and producer, posted on Twitter that it will “inspire a new breed of revolutionary filmmakers.”
But some critics of the film have belittled the film for containing more violence than nuance.
In one scene, an elderly teacher, played by acclaimed Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, is forced to leave his home with his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren after his Muslim student turned militant shoots his son. His daughter-in-law is forced to eat rice mixed with her husband’s blood, and in a later scene she is sawn to death by militants.
In Sikar, moviegoers were stunned by the film’s final scene, which critics say essentially causes audiences to leave furious.
In it, terrorists storm a Pandit refugee camp camouflaged in Indian army uniforms, then line refugees and shoot them at close range.
In the theater, Mr. Yadav sat on the edge of his seat as the bodies collapsed on the screen. He shuddered when the last refugee, the young boy, Shiva, was fatally shot.
“This film makes me so very angry,” he said after the screening. “This is what will stay with me,” he added, “the pain of the Hindu pandits and the horror of the Muslim terrorists.”
Although the film has been seen all over India, it has not been screened in the Kashmir Valley, where theaters have been closed since the 1990s, so Kashmiris haven’t been able to judge it for themselves. This month it was added to a streaming service that allows some Kashmiris to watch it.
Mohammad Ayub Chapri, a taxi driver in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, said that while he was unable to see the film, he learned through social media that it cast a negative light on his community.
“It makes me sad to know this,” Mr Chapri said. “We Muslims have shared meals with the pandits and eat from the same plate. Even Muslims were killed by the radicals, but the film seems to paint all Muslims here with the same brush.”
