Vivek Agnihotri turned down invitation to Oxford Union

Mumbai: Filmmaker and author Vivek Agnihotri on Thursday said he has turned down the Oxford Union Society’s invitation to debate on Kashmir. Sharing his reaction to the invitation and the tweet, he said, “I found the topic offensive, anti-India and anti-Kashmir.” In his letter to Oxford Union Society president Ibrahim Osman-Mowafi, the filmmaker said that though it is every opinion maker’s dream to speak at the Oxford Debating Society, he found himself contemplating the irony of the invitation and after due deliberation, “I have decided to respectfully decline”.

“Your invitation to debate on ‘Does this House believe in an independent state of Kashmir’ is a direct challenge to the sovereignty of India and is unacceptable to me,” he said. “I find it not only distasteful but insulting – not just to 1.4 billion Indians, but also as an insult to the hundreds of thousands of displaced indigenous Hindu victims of the Kashmir genocide of the 1990s.” “Presenting it as a debate is like turning a tragedy into a parlour game, where the stakes are human lives and the price is not just ink but blood,” said Agnihotri, director of ‘The Kashmir Files’, a film that depicts the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley due to targeted attacks in the 1990s. “The story of Kashmir is not a subject of debate; it is a story of suffering, resilience and the search for peace. To limit it to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on independence is to ignore the complex tapestry of human emotions and history. He said the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus is a story that has been paid for in blood, not in funny reactions or applause from the audience.”

The filmmaker said more than 500,000 indigenous Kashmiri Hindus were victims of the genocide by Islamic terrorism in the 1990s. “Almost the entire indigenous Kashmiri Hindu population was forced to leave Kashmir, and since then, they have been living in exile. This was the latest and seventh exodus in their history. I am not even including the barbarity of the earlier six. This is not a debate; it is a historical tragedy.” Agnihotri said Kashmir has always been, is and will remain an integral part of India civilisationally, culturally and politically. “As long as hundreds of thousands of indigenous Kashmiri Hindus remain displaced from their homeland, unable to return due to threats from Islamic terrorists, there can be no debate on the sovereignty of Kashmir.”