‘The Kashmir Files’ is not that film, and doesn’t pretend to be. There may be other films which would gather other points-of-view it doesn’t, for example, touch upon how people are still being killed even after the abrogation of Article 370, and what that says about the ‘vaadi’ today. He has managed to live, strange though this may sound, not knowing the terrible circumstances under which his grandfather sought to rescue him: even your average student of the red-brick university he attends (JNU, by another name) would have at least a smidgeon of knowledge of the recent history of Kashmir, and how, after Jagmohan, there was an exodus of the Pandits, and how they were trucked to Jammu, to eke out a miserable life in the snake-and-scorpion ridden camps.Īlso Read | As ‘Boycott Kapil Sharma’ trends, comedian responds to claim he didn’t invite Vivek Agnihotri’s Kashmir Files team Thirty years later, his grandson Krishna (Darshan Kumaar) comes back to Srinagar, carrying Pushkar Nath’s ashes, and with the help of his grandfather’s closest friends ( Mithun Chakraborty, Puneet Issar, Atul Srivastava) learns lessons which anguish him, and awaken him. The emotional centre of the movie is Pushkar Nath Pandit ( Anupam Kher), a teacher who is ousted from his Srinagar home after his son is brutally killed. Right from the beginning, we know which side the film’s sympathies lie as far as ‘ The Kashmir Files’ is concerned, it was not an ‘exodus’, it was a ‘genocide’, in which thousands of Kashmiri Hindus were massacred, women were raped, children were shot point blank: even today, those families live like refugees. Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s ‘ The Kashmir Files’ expands on that narrative and makes it the sole lens through which he views it. The last time Bollywood brought up the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley was in the 2020 ‘ Shikara’, made by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Also Read | Explained: The Kashmir Pandit tragedy

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