The bitter reality
Oscar-nominated Ashvin Kumar’s documentary Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror travels into the darkness at the heart of Kashmir and makes uncomfortable observations, writes Saibal Chatterjee

THE voiceover drives home the sheer enormity of the tragedy: “On August 21, 2011, the Indian state made a historic announcement. The state human rights commission admitted to 2156 unidentified bodies from 38 unmarked graves in Kashmir.” 

The explicit opening salvo sets the tone for the rest of Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror. A few minutes into the film, a woman, chillingly matter-of-fact, says: “They are all dead.” But nobody knows for sure where these men have gone. So these women are “half widows”, hanging between hope and despair, much like the trouble spot they inhabit.

Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar, who is also the authorial voice on the film’s soundtrack, pulls no punches as he peels off layer after putrid layer of disinformation, obfuscation and insensitive stereotyping that informs the Kashmir narrative in Bollywood kitsch, corporate media dispatches and official handouts from cubicles of cocooned babus.

Kumar’s feature-length documentary isn’t an easy film to watch no matter which side of the emotive divide you are on. It doesn’t resort to rhetoric or emotional grandstanding, and yet delivers sledgehammer blows that knock the stuffing out of the carefully constructed but blatantly superficial myth of ‘normalcy’.

Right at the outset, Inshallah, Kashmir quotes a telling line from the late Agha Shahid Ali’s poem Farewell in ‘A Country without a Post Office’: “They make a desolation and call it peace”. The film then goes on to probe what the next two lines of the poem (not quoted here) so presciently alluded to: “when you left even the stones were buried: the defenceless would have no weapons”.

In the collective consciousness of the rest of the country — where we often take our civil liberties for granted — the Valley is today associated with youngsters armed with stones. But have we stopped and wondered why they are left with no other weapon in their legitimate fight for a better deal.

The film was released online to bypass the censor board. Within 24 hours, it got 40,000 hits

The film delves in startling ways into the benighted lives of a people caught in a deleterious conflict without end and seeks to grasp exactly why “India has never been able to rule the hearts of Kashmiris” (in the words of Dr Amit Wanchoo, who has lived on in the Valley despite the fact that his grandfather, who was “a light to me”, was killed by militants).

Inshallah, Kashmir was released online at midnight on Republic Day to bypass the Central Board of Film Certification. Within 24 hours, it got 40,000 views and, predictably, both bouquets and brickbats.

Kumar has had a running battle with the censors over his previous documentary, Inshallah, Football, the story of a young Kashmiri footballer, Basharat, whose career is blighted on account of an ex-militant father.

The new film deals with questions far more tangled than the individual problem of a Kashmiri boy who wants to go abroad to hone his soccer skills but it is, in essence, really an extension of the story of young Basharat, an innocent victim of forces beyond his control.

Inshallah, Kashmir presents a perspective on the ill-advised moves that Delhi has made and the effect of some of the controversial actions of the security forces on the people of the Valley since militancy erupted in Kashmir in the late 1980s.

It strings together interviews of former militants, torture victims, widows and orphans of men who have gone missing, Pandits who have chosen not to join the exodus from Kashmir and senior bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah, who served in the Valley for 15 years.

On one level, Inshallah, Kashmir records Ashvin’s own personal journey through the towns and villages of Kashmir in an attempt to understand what has gone wrong with India’s handling of the state — this film emerged from footage that was edited out of his previous film, Inshallah, Football.

But the disturbing big picture that it paints should force all sane viewers to sit up and ponder over the sheer magnitude of officialdom’s ostrich-like approach that has been the bane of the mainland’s engagement with trouble-torn Valley.

The victims of human rights violations in this land with a long tradition of Sufi saints and religious harmony (the very bedrock of Kashmiriyat) recount their ordeal on camera, providing insights into the reasons behind their separatist motives and desperate commitment to violence.

Habibullah, on the other hand, represents the tone of reason that is so crucial to finding a lasting solution. He talks about “a sense of shame” that things have been allowed to come to such a pass in the Valley.

Kumar’s film is an honest acknowledgement of the tragedy of Kashmir. There still is poetry and song in the air, but all things fair and the people’s true aspirations have been smothered by the bitter India-Pakistan dispute. 

Until this nation recognises that Kashmir isn’t merely a political problem and that many an innocent, Hindu and Muslim, is paying the price, any attempts at a resolution would only be a flimsy chimera. Inshallah, Kashmir is a perfect starting point. But do we as a people have the gumption of an Ashvin Kumar?