(WASHINGTON, DC – 5/9/2022) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s largest umbrella group for major national, regional, and local American Muslim organizations, strongly condemns the screening of the video “Kashmir Files” at the California state capitol in Sacramento scheduled for Monday, May 9, 2022. The video is being used by the ruling right-wing Hindu national party, BJP, to manipulate the sufferings of Kashmiri pundits for marginalizing the opposing voices in India.
After the 2014 election, the ruling BJP party has been relentlessly suppressing minorities. “Kashmir Files”, cherry-picks the truth, and exploits it emotionally to further the Islamophobic objective of BJP. The film devolves into a piece of pure vitriol and hatred by generalizing a violent episode in Kashmir’s history into collective blame on Muslims in general and Kashmiri Muslims in particular. This is a blatant effort of the BJP government to polarize the Indian population on religious grounds to gain political power.
The human right violations in Kashmir in the past 3 years, after the revocation of the Kashmir state’s autonomy, has been at an unprecedented level as documented by international human right agencies like Amnesty international. These violations are happening in the form of illegal detentions, encounter killings, and rape of Kashmiri civilians (most of whom are Muslims) by the Indian security forces. The screening of Kashmir Files is being used as a justification for the cruel inhuman policies of the Indian government in India. We request the California state senate to condemn the hate-filled movie created to divide Indian people in what used to be a secular democracy.
