Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files made a tremendous splash at the box office – collecting over ₹338.43 CRORES!
Recently, he announced his next film, The Delhi Files. Though he didn’t elaborate what the subject matter was, speculation arose that it revolved around the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Slamming the announcement, the Maharashtra Sikh Association said in a press release that it expresses a “strong reservation against the exploitation and commercialization of unfortunate tragic chapters of humankind like the Sikh riots by people in the name of creative expression and personal profiteering”.
The organisation claimed that the filmmaker was trying to commercialise the tragedy. They asked the Kashmir Files director to desist from disturbing the uneasy calm in the society.
“By extracting profits by depicting deaths in gory details will only result in poisoning the minds of the new generation, who might have heard about it but now seeing them on screen will boil their blood, and spread hatred against others… It would be a deliberate attempt to reopen the wounds of the old and vitiate the fragile peace in society. This is neither correct nor ethical,” it added.
The Maharashtra Sikh Association also said that a film should instead be made on fostering unity, harmony, brotherhood, and national integration.
Vivek Agnihotri REACTS –
When asked to comment on the controversy, Agnihotri replied that people were just being presumptuous about the subject matter.
“I have no idea which organisation is this. I am an Indian; I live in a sovereign state, which gives me full right to express myself in whichever manner I want. I will make what I need to make, what my conscience tells me to make. I am not a servant to anybody’s demands or organisations.
I have not even announced what I’m making, why I am making it. People are making assumptions, which they can keep making. But ultimately it is only for the CBFC to decide what kind of film I make and if it should be allowed to release or not,” he said.