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    Film on Expulsion of Kashmir’s Hindus Is Polarizing and Popular in India

    Called propaganda by critics and essential viewing by fans, “The Kashmir Files,” an unexpected blockbuster, has drawn the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.SIKAR, India — A group of boys are playing cricket on a snowy field in Kashmir, a war-scarred, Muslim-majority region contested between India and Pakistan.As the boys play, they’re listening in the background to radio commentary about a professional cricket match between the archrivals India and Pakistan. When one of the boys, a Hindu named Shiva, cheers on the famed Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, he is beaten for doing so, and his abusers force him to chant, “Long live Pakistan, down with Hindustan!”This opening scene sets the tone for “The Kashmir Files,” a film that has become an unexpected blockbuster, drawing millions of moviegoers across India and the support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.The film, released in March, is largely set in the late 1980s and the early 1990s when a group of militant Islamists forcibly expelled Kashmiri Pandits, upper-caste Hindus, from the region. It has been seized on by the B.J.P. as a tool to advance its narrative of Hindu persecution in India, at a time of increasing calls for violence against India’s minority Muslims.Bharatiya Janata Party workers are encouraging members and supporters to attend, the cast and crew are doing photo ops with Mr. Modi and some states governed by the party have been offering tax breaks on ticket sales and days off from work to spur attendance.People waiting in line for a showing of “The Kashmir Files“ in Mumbai in March.Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters“Those who have not watched it must watch the movie to learn how atrocities and terror gripped Kashmir during Congress rule,” said Amit Shah, India’s home minister, referring to one of India’s major political parties and a rival of the B.J.P.From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Kashmir was in the grip of an insurgency led by militants seeking independence or union with neighboring Pakistan. About 65,000 families, mostly Pandits, left the region in the early 1990s, according to a government report.The region remained restive in the decades that followed, and in 2019, the Modi government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its long-held semiautonomous status, splitting it into two federal territories administered by New Delhi and deploying a heavy security presence amid a clampdown on free speech.While the Indian government has insisted that its decision to take away Kashmir’s special status was intended to improve governance there, and to cut down on militancy, the region has experienced unrest and violence, sometimes deadly, since then, with the killings by both militants and security forces.The film’s critics, including opposition politicians and left-leaning intellectuals and historians, have called it “divisive” and “propaganda,” an attempt to sensationalize the killing of Kashmiri Pandits while avoiding the depiction of any violence against Muslims. In 1990, the peak year of the Pandits’ exodus, hundreds of both Hindus and Muslims were killed by militants.Critics also say the film has given the B.J.P. ammunition to widen the wedge between Hindus and Muslims.A.S. Dulat, a former head of India’s intelligence agency and the author of a book on Kashmir, said there was no doubt that Pandits were targeted by Islamist radicals. But he refused to watch the movie, finding its message unhelpful and poorly timed.“This movie is made to unnecessarily polarize the nation, and Kashmir can do without it,” he said.Many on the political right say that dismissing the film is tantamount to shooting the messenger.“This movie is special because before now, the actual cruelty suffered by Kashmiri Pandits had never been told in this unadulterated manner,” said Gaurav Tiwari, a Bharatiya Janata Party member who has arranged free tickets for moviegoers.Bharatiya Janata Party leaders pushed in March in New Delhi for a lifting of taxes on tickets to the movie.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesMohit Bhan, a Pandit whose ancestral home was burned during the expulsion in 1993, said many in his community saw the film as a long-overdue exploration of the period.“Now that the Pandits have come to believe that justice is hard to come by at the hands of successive governments, they think this movie is it,” said Mr. Bhan, whose party, the People’s Democratic Party, led Jammu and Kashmir in an alliance with Mr. Modi’s B.J.P. before the state was changed into a federal territory.While the response to the film has been deeply divided along political and sectarian lines, its commercial success is beyond dispute: Despite having no song-and-dance numbers — a staple feature of Bollywood movies — “The Kashmir Files” was an instant hit, grossing more than $40 million so far, making it one of the top earners this year. It cost about $2 million to make. Sandeep Yadav, a businessman in his early 30s, was waiting to watch the movie on a recent Sunday at a mall in Sikar, a quiet farm town in the Indian state of Rajasthan.Mr. Yadav said that he had previously learned about what happened to the Pandits on television, and that he rarely went to the movies, relying instead on his cellphone for a daily dose of entertainment.But this movie was a special occasion, he said before the screening at a theater which had completely sold out for “The Kashmir Files” in the first few weeks of its release.“I had heard that Pandits were driven out from their homes in the middle of the night,” he said. “I was curious about the topic and wanted to watch this movie, especially for that.”Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, the director, said he made “The Kashmir Files” after taking close to 700 video testimonies from people who had directly suffered during that period. He declined to say how many of those were Hindus or Muslims.Vivek Agnihotri, director of “The Kashmir Files,” at a news conference in New Delhi, in May.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesIn an interview, Mr. Agnihotri said his goal with the film was to expose what he called the “genocide” inflicted on Pandits and his contention that leftist-leaning academics, intellectuals and writers were complicit in covering up that history.“All I am saying is acknowledge that genocide happened so that nobody repeats it against Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists or Christians,” he said.In both a 2018 book and in interviews, Mr. Agnihotri has railed against left-wing student activists and intellectuals for supporting the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India, calling these so-called urban Naxalites “worse than terrorists.” He has also voiced his support for Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand Hindu monk who recently won re-election as the chief minister of India’s most populous state.Some of Bollywood’s elite have praised the film. Ram Gopal Varma, a director and producer, posted on Twitter that it “will inspire a new breed of revolutionary film makers.”But some of the film’s critics have disparaged the movie for having more violence than nuance.In one scene, an aging teacher, played by the acclaimed Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, is forced to leave his home with his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren after his Muslim student-turned-militant shoots his son. His daughter-in-law is forced to eat rice mixed with her husband’s blood and then, in a later scene, she is sawed to death by militants.In Sikar, the moviegoers sat stunned by the movie’s final scene, which critics say essentially ensures that audiences exit enraged.In it, terrorists storm a Pandit refugee camp camouflaged in Indian Army uniforms, then line up refugees and shoot them dead at point-blank range.In the theater, Mr. Yadav moved to the edge of his seat as bodies slumped over onscreen. He winced when the last refugee, the young boy, Shiva, is fatally shot.“This movie makes me so very angry,” he said after the screening. “This is what will stay with me,” he added, “the pain of the Hindu Pandits and the gruesomeness of the Muslim terrorists.”Critics of the blockbuster denounced it in New Delhi after its opening.Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times, via Getty ImagesWhile the movie has been widely seen across India, it hasn’t been screened in the Kashmir Valley, where theaters have been shuttered since the 1990s, so Kashmiris haven’t been able to assess it themselves. Just this month it was added to a streaming service that will enable some Kashmiris to view it.Mohammad Ayub Chapri, a taxi driver in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, said that while he had not been able to see the film, he had gathered through social media that it cast his community in a negative light.“It makes me sad to know this,” Mr. Chapri said. “We Muslims have shared meals with the Pandits, eating from the same plate. Even Muslims were killed by the radicals, but the movie seems to paint all Muslims here with the same brush.” More

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    Richard Marcinko, Founding Commander of SEAL Team 6, Dies at 81

    The Navy asked Commander Marcinko, a larger-than-life soldier who often flouted rules, to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises.Richard Marcinko, the hard-charging founding commander of Navy SEAL Team 6, the storied and feared unit within an elite commando force that later carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, died Saturday at his home in Fauquier County, Va. He was 81.The cause was believed to be a heart attack, a son, Matthew Marcinko, said.Commander Marcinko climbed the ranks to command Team 6 and wrote a tell-all best seller that cemented the SEALs in pop culture as heroes and bad boys. Though the highly decorated Vietnam veteran led Team 6 for only three years, from 1980 to 1983, he had an outsize influence on the group’s place in military lore.After a failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 American hostages seized in the takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran, the Navy asked Commander Marcinko to build a SEAL unit that could respond quickly to terrorist crises. The name itself was an attempt at Cold War disinformation: Only two SEAL teams existed at the time, but Commander Marcinko called the new unit SEAL Team 6, hoping that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force.He flouted rules and fostered a maverick image for the unit. (Years after leaving the command, he was convicted of military contract fraud.) In his autobiography, “Rogue Warrior,” Commander Marcinko describes drinking together as important to SEAL Team 6’s solidarity; his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats in bars.For years, SEAL Team 6 embraced its rogue persona and was assigned some of the military’s toughest operations. Only Team 6 trains to chase after nuclear weapons that fall into enemy hands. And the team’s role in the 2011 raid that killed bin Laden — the Qaeda leader who 10 years earlier had overseen the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 — spawned a wave of books and movies, elevating the unit to even higher heights of fame.Young officers were sometimes run out of Team 6 for trying to clean up what they saw as a culture of recklessness. Adm. William H. McRaven, who rose to lead the Special Operations Command and oversaw the bin Laden raid, left Team 6 during the Marcinko era after disagreements about leadership.After retiring from the Navy in 1989, Commander Marcinko embarked on a career as a best-selling author, motivational speaker and military consultant, relying heavily on his authenticity as a military veteran. He also appeared on the cover of several of his books, presenting an imposing image of muscular forearms, bearded jaw and piercing eyes staring out at readers.Some SEALs over the years have said that Commander Marcinko invented his own legend. Of his 1992 book, “Rogue Warrior,” written with John Weisman, David Murray wrote in The New York Times that “his story is fascinating” but the method of telling it “is not.” In the book, Commander Marcinko “comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”The book sold millions of copies. Readers apparently wanted more, and Commander Marcinko obliged. His 1995 novel, “Rogue Warrior: Green Team,” also with Mr. Weisman, has “so much action that the reader scarcely has time to breathe,” Newgate Callendar, another Times reviewer, wrote.Richard Marcinko was born on Nov. 21, 1940, to George Marcinko and Emilie Teresa Pavlik Marcinko in his grandmother’s house in Lansford, Pa., a tiny mining town. In his autobiography, he described his mother as “short and Slavic looking” and his father as dark and brooding, with a “nasty temper.”All the men in the family, Commander Marcinko wrote, were miners. “They were born, they worked the mines, they died,” he wrote. “Life was simple and life was hard, and I guess some of them might have wanted to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but most were too poor to buy boots.”He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Navy in 1958. He was deployed to Vietnam with SEAL Team 2 in 1967, according to the National Navy SEAL Museum, which announced the death on its Facebook page.He received many honors for his service, including four Bronze Stars, a Silver Star and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, according to the museum. After completing two tours in Vietnam, he was promoted to lieutenant commander and then took the reins of SEAL Team 2 from 1974 to 1976, according to the museum.Commander Marcinko is survived by his wife, Nancy; four daughters, Brandy Alexander, Tiffany Alexander, Hailey Marcinko and Kathy-Ann Marcinko; two sons, Matthew and Ritchie Marcinko; and several grandchildren. An earlier marriage to Kathy Black ended in divorce.On Sunday night, Admiral McRaven called Commander Marcinko “one of the more colorful characters” in Naval special warfare history.“While we had some disagreements when I was a young officer, I always respected his boldness, his ingenuity and his unrelenting drive for success,” Admiral McRaven wrote in an email. “I hope he will be remembered for his numerous contributions to the SEAL community.”Dave Philipps More