Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files has opened up a national debate that has been in discussion in undertones for over 32 years now. The film which is based on the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from Jammu and Kashmir after the militancy’s rise in the valley has got everybody talking about what happened in the Valley in the year 1990. Now, days after the release of the film, Vivek Agnihotri posted a video clip of an interview on a Kashmiri news channel. The video is of a Kashmiri Muslim who is seen apologising for the killing of Kashmiri Pandits and “acknowledging the genocide” that took place in the Valley.In the video, Javed Beigh, general secretary of People’s Democratic Front (Secular), revealed to ANN News Kashmir that he witnessed the Sangrampora massacre with his own eyes. In the video, he says that those who were killed during the 1990s were neither coming in way of anyone’s freedom nor they were killing any Kashmiri Muslims. He asks, “There were unarmed people. If that’s not a massacre, what is it?” He goes on to say that Kashmiri Pandits, who belong to Kashmir should get an apology from every Kashmiri Muslim as they are as much part of the Valley as any other individual. Resharing the video clip on his Twitter account, Vivek Agnihotri tweeted, “This young Kashmiri Muslim is saying “sorry for the Genocide to all Kashmiri Hindus” on a Pakistani channel. Acknowledging the Genocide and saying sorry is the first step to #RightToJustice. If someone knows this young man, Pl send my love and thanks to him (sic).’The Kashmir Files’ is a movie about the testimonial of 700 Kashmiri Pandits. Helmed by Vivek Agnihotri, and starring Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumaar, Mithun Chakraborty and Pallavi Joshi, ‘The Kashmir Files’ has been breaking one box office record after another since its March 11 release.Recently, when the film’s team was in the national capital to interact with the media, Agnihotri said it took him and his team four years to research and make the movie, and the Global Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora (GKPD) helped him find and locate the Kashmiri Pandits, who were the direct victims of the violence in Kashmir. He shared about making a web series about it too. Agnihotri said, “We have so much material that we can produce a series. All accounts are heart-wrenching ones. These are human stories… We are thinking about it… We will come out with a series.” “The immense response that we got from the community was tremendous. These are all true accounts. Nobody knew about these. When we began with the thought, no one believed that this had happened with Kashmiri Hindus.”
