Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files‘ touches upon a very dark chapter in India’s history—the exodus of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits during the Kashmir Insurgency—that deserves to be revisited and examines with absolute fearlessness. To Agnihotri’s credit, he has succeeded in achieving what had promised. Unlike some of the earlier attempts made to capture the chain of events that led to the exodus, Agnihotri’s film doesn’t back down from employing an expository approach needed to showcase the brutality associated with it. ‘The Kashmir Files‘ stars Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, and Pallavi Joshi in pivotal roles. Now, it’s always been very problematic for me to see storytellers turning a blind eye towards genocide of such an enormous proportion that the Kashmir Valley witnessed back in 1989-1990, which resulted in a mass exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits.
Ever since it hit the theatres, ‘The Kashmir Files’ has not just been making its presence at the box-office but it has also been creating all kinds of records on the internet. At one point the film even held a rating of 9.9 on IMDb, a popular website hosting film and television audience reviews, owned by Amazon. But, shockingly, the rating system for ‘The Kashmir Files’ was abruptly changed and the film now stands at a rating of 8.3/10 with a message on the IMDb page of the film reading, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”
Now, the biggest irony of course is that the same website didn’t do anything when Christopher Nolan’s fans were at the forefront of a major conspiracy in order to elevate ‘The Dark Knight’ to the top spot by toppling ‘The Godfather,’ back in 2008. More recently in 2017, the IMDb ratings of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Episode VIII)’ suffered the wrath of unhappy Star Wars fans who wanted to teach the film’s director, Rian Johnson, a lesson for the “increased diversity in the space franchise”. IMDb yet again chose not to act even as the ratings continued to plummet in a most fishy and suspicious manner. So, it really did come as a shock when IMDb introduced alternate weighting calculation to pull down the ratings of ‘The Kashmir Files’. How can one of the world’s leading film and television websites follow such a biased approach towards a popular Bollywood film which is creating buzz all around, especially when in the past it has repeatedly chosen to act neutrally with regards to Hollywood films? The fact that IMDb is owned by Amazon further adds to the doubts around the real intentions behind the dubious decision to abruptly change the rating mechanism for The Kashmir Files.
While many sections of netizens have called out IMDb for its duplicitous ways, a large section of Bollywood for some reason hasn’t yet come forward in the support of the film. What’s most perplexing is that the who’s who of Bollywood continues to be mum even though after a long hiatus a film is finally succeeding in bringing the audiences back the theatres. Whether it’s a film like ‘The Kashmir Files‘ or ‘Parzania‘ one expects Bollywood to back good content and expose the hypocritical ways of the West to maintain its supremacy over the film business.
Now, the biggest problem with whitewashing or distorting historical blunders is that is allows for similar mistakes to be repeated again. Here one is reminded of the infamous Tulsa race massacre that took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US.
For the longest time, the Tulsa race massacre wasn’t taught in classrooms as part of a conscious effort to erase it from public memory. It was only after the George Floyd protests that the massacre started gaining public attention. Since then many television shows including ‘Lovecraft County’ and ‘The Equalizer’ have put spotlight on the massacre. Also, Human Rights Watch released a report titled ‘The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument,’ demanding reparations for survivors and descendants of the violence.
So, the question really is not whether ‘The Kashmir Files’ deserves to be a top film on IMDb. The actual question is why certain vested interests are afraid of films that dare to unearth a disturbing piece of history: be it the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, or the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of 1989-90, or the 1984 Sikh massacre, which although has been a subject of a few films has yet to be revisited with the same brutal honesty of a film like ‘The Kashmir Files’.
