Vivek Agnihotri: Fact Seeker

“The reviewers were not reviewing my movie, they were reviewing me,” says Vivek Agnihotri, of the criticism levelled against the films he has made since he discovered that instead of making cinema that people wanted, he should make cinema that he wanted. Vivek Agnihotri 3.0, as he calls himself, has done wonders since he came to that conclusion. Instead of making tepid star vehicles such as Chocolate: Deep Dark Secrets (2005), Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007), and Hate Story (2012), he has made Buddha In A Traffic Jam (2016), which is set on campus, not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru University; The Tashkent Files (2019), about the mystery behind late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death; and the latest and most successful The Kashmir Files, which he made on a budget of Rs 15 crore. As of now, it has made Rs 200 crore at the box office in its second week. But more than that, it has become a collective cathartic experience, enabling the rest of India to understand the pain of Kashmiri Pandits who were ousted from their homeland in 1990.

For Bollywood, it is a rude awakening, and few have congratulated him on his success. But he has got an endorsement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has spoken about attempts to suppress the truth of The Kashmir Files. More than that, Agnihotri, 48, has got the zeitgeist right, tapped into a deep, psychic wound that has seen Kashmiri Pandits and others join each other in their suffering.

On the phone from Mumbai, he says: “Pallavi [Joshi, his actress wife] and I are just travelling day and night, I’ve not slept, my thumbs are hurting from texting, but I’ve realised one thing: when you express yourself, people listen. Unfortunately, 99 per cent of the time, you want to impress people.” He says audiences can tell when the filmmaker has dedicated himself to the cause, and told the truth. He says the Vivek Agnihotri 1.0 version was fearless, loving, open-minded, until he was brainwashed by the leftists into distrusting everything. In the 2.0 version, he made films he is not proud of, but now the end of his trilogy on the three pillars of democracy is near. He made The Tashkent Files on truth, The Kashmir Files on justice, and now he and his seven-member team will get to work on freedom. “I’ve been at it since 2010 against all kinds of opposition—everyone who wanted to destroy me, but people notice the truth,” he says.

He’s been on the road since November 8, 2021, as the travel ban to the US was lifted, showing the film to small groups of senators, Congressmen and Kashmiri Pandits. In 32 years, he says, the film has been able to do what politics and geopolitics couldn’t, get the conversation started on recognising what he insists is the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits—the terms “exodus” and “ethnic cleansing” are inadequate. As for the criticism of The Kashmir Files as propaganda rather than art, he dismisses it. “Between 1.5 crore and 2 crore people have watched the film. And 10-15 people are criticising it. They criticise everything,” he says.

Agnihotri’s filmography is divided into his commercial, mainstream work before 2010: Chocolate, Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal and Hate Story. The transformation started with Buddha In A Traffic Jam, which attacked the Urban Naxal community, a combination of activists and academics who believe in the Marxist ideology and infiltrate, or so he says, campuses and the media. By accident or by design, this community also became the target of the new establishment that took over in Delhi in 2014. Agnihotri became a popular speaker on campuses and on TV debates, articulating his views with aggression. On Twitter, he was equally assertive, sometimes downright ugly, in his attacks on fellow Bollywoodians—Swara Bhasker and Richa Chadha. Much like actress Kangana Ranaut, he was happy to be identified with the new regime, and incurred the wrath of the left-liberals, who didn’t seem discomfited by similar attempts by filmmakers like Karan Johar to endear themselves to the emerging power structure.

It will be interesting to see how Agnihotri, formerly at the margins of Bollywood, will be treated now. Bollywood worships success, no matter what the ideology. And Agnihotri, a graduate of Delhi’s Indian Institute of Mass Communications, has been more than successful, on his own terms.

cinemaethnic cleansingKashmiri PanditsThe Kashmir FilesVivek Agnihotri