By Sujeet Rajan
June 22: Vivek Agnihotri, director of the critically acclaimed and box office success film, ‘The Kashmir Files’, came out on top with his reasoned-out, intelligent and nuanced answers in a highly biased and interrogation-type interview by Isaac Chotiner, a staff writer at The New Yorker.
The Q&A format interview, shockingly headlined, ‘What a disturbing new film reveals about Modi’s India,’ talks about everything else but the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits who were brutalized, forced to leave their homes in Kashmir after a genocide, more than 30 years ago.
Chotiner tries his best to somehow make Agnihotri and Prime Minister Modi culpable for modern day happenings in India, instead of delving deeper into the film itself, which is not a documentary but a feature portrayal of the genocide in Kashmir that began in 1989.
In his long-winded ridiculous intro to the interview, Chotiner (who in all likelihood has never visited any part of India, forget Kashmir) has this to say of ‘The Kashmir Files’, which he admits to watching in California: “to see it as anything other than a glorified exercise in stigmatization and fearmongering would be a mistake.” Perhaps, Chotiner needs to watch a few more films and read some books that revolve around the theme of genocide. Or perhaps he’s trying to say that Indian filmmakers cannot make films of their choice, for fear of repercussions in society.
Chotiner makes outlandish claims about the abrogation of Article 370, in his intro to the interview: “In 2019, the Modi government stripped Kashmir of the special status it was granted after Partition, under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Although Article 370 had already been steadily eroded, the formal revocation, which allowed non-Kashmiris to buy land in the region for the first time in decades, raised fears that Modi’s government had plans for a settler-colonial project for Hindus.”
Here is a sample of the biased line of ‘interrogation’ that Agnihotri was subjected to: ‘What about the Muslims in Kashmir, where the Indian Army, which occupies Kashmir, is very brutal with the people—subjecting them to violence and rape. What do you think about that?
Agnihotri responded: “I think that is ninety-nine per cent a one-sided narrative. Propaganda.”
Read the full New Yorker interview.
