The Bombay High Court dismissed a PIL seeking to halt the release of the upcoming Hindi film, The Kashmir Files, on Tuesday.
The film, directed by Vivek Agnihotri, is slated to release on Friday. It is based the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community from the Kashmir valley in the 1990s and features actors Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty, Darshan Kumaar, Pallavi Joshi, Prakash Belawadi, Puneet Issar, and Atul Srivastava, among others.
On Monday, a PIL was filed at the Bombay High Court by Intezar Hussain Sayed, a resident of Uttar Pradesh, stating that the upcoming film has a “very potent mixture of inflammatory scenes which are bound to cause communal violence in the prevailing circumstances in the country.”
He further alleged that the film’s trailer, which was released two weeks earlier, had a few dialogues that are discriminatory, defamatory and against the principles of the Constitution of India.
“It is clearly evident that the whole movie will also be portraying a targeted one-side view of the incident, which not only hurts the religious sentiments of Muslim community but can also ignite emotions and inflame members of the Hindu Community, with the clear possibility of triggering violence and immeasurable destruction in all parts of India,” the PIL stated.
It also pointed to the ongoing elections in various states as providing “scope to misuse” the film “by escalating the disputes and differences to full scale communal violence.”
However, on Tuesday, the High Court dismissed the PIL, noting that Sayed has not challenged the censor certificate issued by the Central Board of Film Certificate (CBFC).
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The film has been passed by the CBFC with an A or “adults-only” certificate, after seven minor cuts. The cuts include a scene with the Indian national flag falling on the ground and the shot of the photo of a former Prime Minister of India in a dreaded terrorist’s house. The term ‘Disco CM’ was also cut and the words ‘Pandit’ and ‘Hindu’ were deleted, wherever they were associated with cuss words. Further, the name of a university shown in the film was changed from ‘JNU’ to ‘ANU’.