Deception in the presentation of facts or narratives has been around as early as there were people who had agendas to push.
One of the tools of influence and control of any value is propaganda. In many countries, the British government was directly involved in the foundations of broadcasting – first on radio, and later in newsreels. Though this state support had its benefits, it inevitably meant that the broadcast content was sympathetic to those in power. Radio and newsreels were used for manipulating public opinion in World War I as a way of stoking pride, nationalism, and morale while the war dragged on. The line between truth and fiction was blurred in films; though the depicted real events of some sequences were staged. The film was just one medium the British government employed in a wider campaign which was quite effective. Indeed, there was one German soldier on whom the British propaganda had a strong impact: Adolf Hitler. Now, due to the infamy of Hitler and his followers, we associate all our understanding of propaganda with Nazi Germany. Deception in the presentation of facts or narratives has been around as early as there were people who had agendas to push. Roman accounts of non-Roman civilisations are considered to probably be propagandistic. With each new technology – theatre, painting, and the printing press – propaganda found a new medium in which to spread. It was no different when film emerged as its medium.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 created a political environment that pushed the role of propaganda in cinema. The word ‘propaganda’ at that time didn’t have the negative connotation it has today.
Propaganda was termed as an ‘essential activity’ to spread awareness among the public and ‘stimulate their revolutionary thoughts’. Many great filmmakers emerged in this era who believed in the power of propaganda and they made films that are considered some of the most important artworks in cinematic history. These were filmmakers who gave many film theories that are still taught across the best film schools in the world. Among them, the most prominent is Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein who gave ‘montage theories’ or editing techniques. Most modern editing techniques currently used in Hollywood and Bollywood owe a lot to Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov’s theories of editing.
As such, the base of cinematic editing techniques lies in the idea of propaganda. No wonder famous French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once remarked: “Cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.” There is a medium of psychological manipulation through the use of editing that every filmmaker uses to present their ideas or ‘truth’ to the public.
Cut to 2022, The Kashmir Files makes a huge splash at the Indian Box-office. Director, Vivek Agnihotri poured his soul out to tell the Indian masses about one of the biggest if not the biggest atrocities ever committed on Indian soil. It recounts the story of Kashmiri Pandits, and the exodus they faced in the 1990s. A deeply terrible tragedy that saw the lives of many Kashmiri Pandits forcefully taken away from them. Many were killed and even more driven away from their homes.
Agnihotri in an interview with Newslaundry mentioned that facts are not facts and The Kashmir Files upholds that idea to a T. There are countless ways of looking at any given fact. What separates facts from knowledge is context. This context – narratives that help us weave together facts – is what makes them intelligible to our limited human mind. These narratives are at the heart of both drama and politics and, if used in a deliberately misleading way to serve a partisan cause, is also known as propaganda.
The director gets several facts right about the Kashmiri exodus in his film. The killings have shown in the movie happened, as did the terrified flight of the Pandits. Yet the movie winds up as a particularly shallow and exploitative project, where the object of the storytelling is not to shine a light on the suffering of the Pandits but to use them as a springboard to illuminate the worldview of Agnihotri and by extension the BJP. The film was made tax-free in several BJP led states. The PM of the country publicly praised the movie, something he has not done in recent memory. Assam’s BJP led government even asked their employees, party members, and workers to watch the film by taking half-a-day’s leave.
Hitler spends two chapters of Mein Kampf dissecting the importance and power of propaganda. He placed a lot of importance on propaganda’s reach, writing, ‘all propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to’. Hitler’s Nazi government controlled all cinema, initially through tax incentives (creatively manipulated by filmmakers who did not want to make Nazi movies) then by direct dictatorial control. To make sure their message got to the most impressionable in society, the Nazi government ensured that all schools had film projectors.
In Triumph of the Will directed by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler and the Nazi party are glorified. Young Aryan men, women, and children, bright and blue-eyed smiling Adolf surrounded by Swastikas presented an image of strength, unity, and prosperity which was enough for people to buy into the idea of a superior Aryan race. This resulted in the people of Germany actively taking part in the erasure of countless Jewish people. Which is similar to what happened with the Babri Masjid demolition.
Casting our minds back, we can imagine a busy afternoon and busier roads. Scores of trucks, vans, cars, and bikes filled to its brim with people carrying Trishools, wearing saffron turbans, saffron shawls, and chanting, “Jai Shree Ram!” These men, young and old, were rallying to rebuild the Ram temple in Ayodhya where Babri Masjid stood. Lal Krishna Adwani, party member and leader of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) went door to door carrying red bricks, asking families to write their names on it with Jai Shree Ram written on the other side. With those bricks, he would rebuild the Ram temple and bring true glory to India and its ancestors.
A frenzied crowd starts to gather chanting slogans and waiting eagerly for LK Advani to come out of the neighbourhood and when the moment Advani comes out, his scores of followers looked at him, wide-eyed as if he were a messiah, their faces transformed, like they found the meaning of life.
This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is not. Replace, LK Advani with Narendra Modi, and this will sound like an election rally. LK Advani’s attempt to bring Ram temple was received well. This was in 1990. As the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and BJP were collecting funds from all across the world including India, were able to churn out videos after videos recounting one particular incident as fact. The video showed a child dressed in Lord Ram’s attire appearing out of nowhere inside the locked gates of Babri Masjid on a stormy night in December 1949 and that young child was asking people to be let free and restore his home, i.e., the Ram Temple.
People, intoxicated by words of the BJP and VHP on December 6, 1992, invaded the masjid in droves and destroyed all essence of it. Brokedown its walls, hurt people, and claimed it to be lord Ram’s victory.
Other films were not designed to glorify the Nazis but to dehumanise, criminalise, and demonise vulnerable minorities—, particularly Jews. Joseph Goebbels even issued special instructions on how such movies were to be described. Does that sound familiar? The Kashmir Files does just that. While Vivek Agnihotri and Leni Reifenstahl are separated by both decades and critical acclaim, they find common ground in the propagandist’s most insidious tool – a lie carefully layered upon a kernel of truth. Riefenstahl's truth was that the movie she is most notorious for was filmed live, and thus could not be propaganda for the Nazi regime, but was simply journalistic documentation of reality. The lie was that that reality had been constructed specifically for the camera when some footage of the party leaders were spoiled, Hitler himself gave orders for the shots to be re-shot.
The truth that Agnihotri bases his film on is that the Kashmiri Pandit exodus featured a great deal of unconscionable violence by militants and caused terror among the minority Kashmiri Pandit population. The lie is that all Muslims must be collectively punished for this, and any violence visited upon them is justly deserved. As the film reaches its 200 CR. mark at the box-office, multiple videos have surfaced on the web where people are actively calling out the genocide of Indian Muslims. The central government is looking at The Kashmir Files as the only film to come out of the elitist, nepotist, cocaine addled cabal of Bollywood highlighting the plight and trauma of the Kashmiri Pandits; completely overlooking a 2020 film, Shikara that also delved into the lives of Kashmiri Pandits during their exodus. That film never got any tax exemptions, PM praise, or weekday leaves. Maybe, that’s because the entire nation was suffering from collective brain fog that made them forget all about it. The film shows the displaced pandits in moments of fear and despondence and their helplessness to show the audience that they, the everyday Hindu man, woman, and child could be them if this continues. But how is it continuing? you may ask, the film with ease paints leftists, liberals, the so-called JNU intellectual elites, and Urban Naxals as spawns of Satan, who are not only blind to the atrocities of the pandits but actively dismissing it.
Agnihotri’s cinematography uses visual cues as a moral device – there are long, lingering shots of blood seeping on floors, roads, ground, with the camera not resting on a militant’s face as much as his actions. Gunshots to the face are repetitive to the point that they lose their percussive force, and become expected. In contrast, the camera lingers lovingly on the faces of those terrified.
The Us versus Them narrative can be clearly seen in the film and through that film, Agnihotri shot the gun off the Kashmiri Pandit’s shoulders and the bullet is dipped in the rhetoric of the BJP and their populist agenda. The Kashmir Files will soon be replaced by another big-ticket film. People will talk about that film with gusto and dissect it with eagle vision because people, collectively have poor memories. But the effect of Agnihotri’s film will live on and the dead will be exhumed again for the next election cycle.
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