Kashmiri Hindus

So for me, I was like, "Football? In Kashmir?" And they were like, "Yeah." And, uh, they were like, "You know, we need to meet the founders of this club." And now what was the beauty of this club was, in India we have a lot of religions.

The founders of this club were a Kashmiri Hindu and a Kashmiri Muslim, okay? And these two men had come together in a place like Kashmir, where you don't have the resources that any other place, any normal place, and I'm s- sad to use the word normal, you know, but the resources that any other place would have.

And these two founders came together, formed a club, and literally gave purpose to a lot of youth there, because a lot of stone-pelters, a lot of kids who were not going to college had come down to play for this club.

And within three years, this club was playing professionally.

It went through to the '90s.

It painted Kashmiri Muslims as the agitators, as terrorists, as bloodthirsty, as wanting to drive out anyone who wasn't Muslim, and it was then, uh, kind of used to propel this myth that, uh, Kashmiri Hindus were killed in great numbers, were driven out of the valley.

This is what the Kashmir Files did because it took its inspiration directly from, um, Hindutva propaganda, which is es- essentially there to demonize Muslims and utilize a lot of Islamophobia.

So I think, you know, from my point of view, why it was so important for a Kashmiri filmmaker to be telling the story is that we finally get a voice.

They all grew up together.

You know, Hindu, Kashmiri Hindus eat meat.

It's very different.

You know, Kashmiri Muslims used to practice the form of Sufism.

between

Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Hindus.

But they cannot start from 1989.

I certainly won't start from 1947.

There's never, ever a parallel given to the Kashmiri Sikhs.

Why doesn't everybody talk about them? They didn't flee.

Why did they flee? Why did the Kashmiri Hindus, the Bandits flee? The Sikhs, my nanihal, my mom's side of the family is in Barmala.

I used to see Sikh brothers everywhere, laughing and playing and going to school and having dinner together.