Cong's 'Truth' in 9 Tweets, Movie on Mute, CM at Theatre: Inside Debate & Politics 'Kashmir Files' Has Kicked Off

Based on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, ‘The Kashmir Files‘, has triggered varied emotions since its release on Friday. While some felt personal pain after watching the movie, others reported that the screening was either abruptly stopped or shown on mute.

People in Jammu, Shillong and other places took to social media to report the incident. In south Goa, a group of people confronted the manager of Inox Movie theatre on Sunday, alleging that while booking for tickets online, it showed “sold out”. However, when they barged into the theatre, most of the seats were empty. Several groups have accused Inox management in South Goa of “conspiracy”. After the incident, caretaker CM Pramod Sawant has decided to watch ‘The Kashmir Files’ at Inox Panjim on Monday.

The debate over the authenticity of the “genocide of Kashmiri Pandits”, as the movie states, has now taken a political turn, with the Kerala unit of Congress trying to compare the causalities among Kashmiri Pandits and the Muslim community. “It was the terrorists who targeted the Pandits. In 17 years (1990-2007), 399 Kashmiri Pandits were killed in terrorist attacks. The number of Muslims killed by terrorists in the same period was 15,000,” they tweeted, only to delete in later.

Congress further said that in the 1984 communal riots after partition, over 1,00,000 Kashmiri Muslims were killed in Jammu, but there were no retaliatory killings of Pandits. They accused the BJP of “doing nothing for Pandits’ migrants and continuing support to the VP Singh government till November 1990”.

Slamming Congress’s “Kashmir Files vs Truth”, Shehzad Poonawala said that “Islamist” Congress has done “exactly what Nazi sympathisers do with denial of holocaust”. He added that the Congress is “whitewashing Kashmiri Hindu Genocide and justifying it”.

BJP MP KJ Alphons tweeted, “Congress doesn’t understand history, they have hugely distorted versions. Everyone knows that over 1.5 lakh Kashmiri Pandits were driven out on communal grounds, by the ruling dispensation, which was Congress or its supported govts.”

Meanwhile, the activists of Dogra front held a protest in Jammu in favour of the movie and against Congress for its controversial tweets. A Supreme Court lawyer demanded that a Tribunal for Truth and Reconciliation in Kashmir be constituted, and testimonies from affected parties through public hearings be invited.

“Kashmiri Pandit community was made to leave their homes in the most painful condition. History witness to the fact that all this was a cumulative outcome of a series of Congress blunders beginning from what’s now recorded as infamous Nehruvian blunders,” Union minister Jitendra Singh said.

Anupam Kher, who played the role of Pushkar Nath Pandit in the movie, said, “This is not a film for me. It’s a wound in my life that will never get cured.”

The Madhya Pradesh government has announced that policemen in the state will be granted leave to watch “The Kashmir Files”. State home minister Narottam Mishra told reporters that instructions for this have been issued to Director General of Police Sudhir Saxena.

“I have just told the DGP to grant a leave whenever any policeman in the state wants to go watch ‘The Kashmir Files’ with their family,” Mr Mishra told reporters.

Last year in October, at least five civilians were shot dead in the heart of Srinagar within a span of 48 hours. One of them was a street vendor from Bihar, while the other was Makhan Lal Bindroo, the owner of one of Srinagar’s best-known pharmacy. Bindroo was a Kashmiri Pandit who decided to stay in his homeland along with his family, even in the worst of times in the 1990s, when the region witnessed exodus of Pandit families.

Read all the Latest News India and Breaking News here