Explained: How Steven Spielberg’s 'Schindler’s List' has been dragged into the IFFI row on ‘The Kashmir Files’

The closing ceremony of the 53rd International Film Festival of India (IFFI) being held in Goa ended on a sour note and has caused a massive controversy over the comments made by the festival’s jury head, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid on The Kashmir Files.

In his remarks, which have now snowballed into a major row that has also elicited reactions from the Ambassador of Israel to India, Lapid questioned the Vivek Agnihotri directed movie’s inclusion in the competitive section. “There were 15 films in the international competition — the front window of the festival. Fourteen out of them had the cinematic qualities… and evoked vivid discussions. We were, all of us, disturbed and shocked by the 15th film, The Kashmir Files. That felt to us like a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival,” Lapid said.

The comments have, unsurprisingly, not been received well with Anupam Kher, who starred in the movie, and Israel’s Ambassador both reacting negatively to it.

Kher, taking to Twitter, shared a series of stills of legendary American filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film Schindler’s List along with a picture from The Kashmir Files. He then captioned it as “No matter how big the lie is, it’s always smaller than the truth in comparison.”

When asked for his comments later, the 67-year-old veteran actor was quoted as telling ANI, “If Holocaust is right, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits is right too. Seems pre-planned as immediately after that the toolkit gang became active. May God give him wisdom.”

#WATCH | Anupam Kher speaks to ANI on Int'l Film Festival of India Jury Head remarks for 'Kashmir Files', "...If holocaust is right, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits is right too. Seems pre-planned as immediately after that the toolkit gang became active. May God give him wisdom.." pic.twitter.com/cUQ1bqzFs7

— ANI (@ANI) November 29, 2022

The Israeli Ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, also slammed Lapid, saying the filmmaker had “abused” his invitation to chair the panel of judges . In an open letter, Gilon also said about Lapid that it’s insensitive and presumptuous to speak about historic events before deeply studying them.

An open letter to #NadavLapid following his criticism of #KashmirFiles. It’s not in Hebrew because I wanted our Indian brothers and sisters to be able to understand. It is also relatively long so I’ll give you the bottom line first. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED. Here’s why: pic.twitter.com/8YpSQGMXIR

— Naor Gilon (@NaorGilon) November 29, 2022

As the row rages on, we take a closer look at the Holocaust and Schindler’s List.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as Shoah in Hebrew, is described as the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.

The Nazis called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.”

The Holocaust came from the idea that the Aryan race was more important than others and that Jews, Roma (‘gypsies’), black people and other ethnic groups were inferior to Aryans.

Taking this forward, the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler began persecuting people who they didn’t think were worthy members of society — most notably Jewish people. They introduced laws that discriminated against them and took away their rights. Jewish people were not allowed in certain places and were banned from getting certain jobs.

They also stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of “un-Germanic” writings.

They also began to set up concentration camps where they could send people they believed to be “enemies of the state” to be imprisoned and forced to work. This included Jewish people and anybody who did not support them.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis created more than 40,000 camps in areas they controlled. Some were work camps, some were transit camps to process prisoners, and others — the first of which would open in 1941 — would be extermination camps, where the Nazis could kill people in great numbers.

Under the code name Aktion Reinhard, the Nazis built several extermination camps. Here, the victims were murdered in gas chambers with diesel engine exhaust fumes immediately upon arrival. While many were killed in the gas chambers, others died owing to the terrible conditions at the concentration camps.

One of the worst camps was that of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, which has become the emblematic site of the “final solution,” a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 per cent of them were Jews. Also among the dead were some 19,000 Roma who were held at the camp until the Nazis gassed them on 31 July, 1944 — the only other victim group gassed in family units alongside the Jews.

In recent times, there have been many in India who have compared the horrors of the Holocaust with that of the Kashmir exodus of 1990 . Thousands and thousands Kashmiri Pandits had to leave behind their homes in fear of threats and killings by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists. Prior to the horrific night of 19 January 1990, Pandits were targeted in Jammu and Kashmir. The Valley’s BJP leader Tika Lal Taploo was shot dead. Neel Kanth Ganjoo, a retired judge, was shot dead outside the J&K High Court in Srinagar. Noted journalist-lawyer Prem Nath Bhat was shot dead in Anantnag. Hit lists of Pandits were in circulation.

Schindler’s List and the truth behind it

The IFFI jury head, Nadav Lapid’s comments on The Kashmir Files has also caused outrage on Twitter, with many demanding that Lapid apologise and drew parallels between the Bollywood starrer and the famous Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List.

Yes I was also "disturbed and shocked" to see The Schindler's list and all those holocaust movies. They were "vulgar" & "propaganda" driven and easily enticed the gullible masses into believing it! https://t.co/1ySNbNIRhr

— KishoreIyer (@KishoreIyer5) November 28, 2022

Made in 1993, the movie, starring Liam Neeson in the title role, followed Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II.

The film has been considered a landmark in the history of Holocaust storytelling because it inspired survivors to tell more stories and the world to listen.

Interestingly, the film that earned Spielberg an Oscar, is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler.

However, while the movie showed Schindler as a hero, the truth of the matter is that he wasn’t a saint. He cheated on his wife, he drank excessively and he spied for Abwehr, the counterintelligence arm of the Wehrmacht (the German military), in Czechoslovakia.

History records show that Schindler set up an enamelware factory in Krakow that used a combination of Jewish workers interred by the Germans and free Polish workers. His initial interest, of course, was to make money. But as time went on, he grew to care about his Jewish workers, particularly those with whom he came into contact on a daily basis. In addition, helping Jews became a way to fight against what he viewed as disastrous and brutal policies emanating from Adolf Hitler and the Schutzstaffel.

Spielberg’s touching tale received him much praise and love — he won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, seven BAFTAS and three Golden Globes. However, it wasn’t without criticism, either.

What many critics pointed out about the movie was that Spielberg opted to tell a story of fortunate survivors, but that he chose a noble gentile as a protagonist.

In a 2011 ranking of Jewish films for Tablet, Liel Leibovitz puts Schindler’s List dead last, arguing “the fact that the movie, really, is about a Christ-like gentile who saves a horde of hapless Jews who have no agency or resolve of their own… makes Schindler’s List not just one of the most ham-handed Holocaust films ever made but also, peculiarly, one of the least Jewish in sensibility.”

The German newspaper Die Welt had described it as “the fantasies of a young boy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before.”

Whatever be the criticism of the movie, one can’t argue that the movie brought to life the horrors of the Holocaust at a time when levels of knowledge about it were shockingly low.

In that aspect, The Kashmir Files is the same as it too narrated to people how the Kashmiri Pandits were brutally forced out by Islamised forces in an Indian equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

With inputs from agencies

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