The Tashkent Files has had its successful run at the box office. Vivek Agnihotri’s controversial film based on the mysterious death of Lal Bahadur Shastri had created quite a stir during the election season.
Agnihotri will now be moving on to his next feature, based on the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community from the Kashmir Valley due to militancy. It will be an investigation, recording first hand testimonials of the victims and also the perpetrators, he was quoted as saying by IANS.
“Kashmiri Pandits are homeless in their own country. This is the seventh exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir – their home. Since the WW II, there hasn’t been such a violent and barbaric ethnic cleansing anywhere in the world,” Agnihotri said in a statement.
“This is India’s holocaust where at midnight the minorities of Kashmir valley were asked to leave the valley and they were specifically asked to leave behind all their property and women.
“Children were killed with AK-47, women were raped, men were cut with woodcutting saws, houses were burnt. India’s most secular region was converted into an Islamic region controlled with Sharia law. My film is about the sinister politics behind it. Everyone is responsible for such tragedy. My film is about that,” he added.
Agnihotri also shared that his team had been planning to form a ‘Project KP Commission’ where they will record first-hand testimonials of “victims” and “perpetrators”. He wanted a fair and unbiased investigation so that the prejudiced narrative can be corrected.
Last week, the filmmaker had tweeted, “More I read on Kashmiri Pandit exodus, I feel ashamed of myself. What was I doing in 1991? What had happened to me that I kept watching the direct attack on Hindu civilisation, shrinking of Hindu territory, culture in its own land? What made me so indifferent to my own identity?”