When the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile came out — 20 years ago, hard as that is to believe — certain Chamber of Commerce types in Detroit complained that the film’s depiction of the struggling city was too negative, too grim, too hopeless. Not so, replied one local newspaper columnist. In fact, as the columnist noted, Detroit residents wishing to see 8 Mile would have to leave the city to do it, because Detroit at that time had no first-run movie theater operating. Very few national retailers had any presence in the city of Detroit — if you had wanted to read a little book on why things were so bad in that unhappy city, you couldn’t go down to the local Barnes & Noble to pick one up — there wasn’t one. Detroit is still in pretty bad shape, but, happily, a few things have improved since then.
Right now, India is being convulsed by a new movie, a historical drama called The Kashmir Files, about the suffering of the Kashmiri Pandits, an ancient Hindu community, at the hands of Pakistan-backed Islamic militants in the 1990s. I have not seen the film. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a fan, and the kind of people who don’t think much of Modi don’t think much of the film, which critics say is propagandistic, crude, historically inaccurate, etc. It may be, though that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad film: Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was propagandistic and historically inaccurate (that infamous church-burning scene seems to have been borrowed from the crimes of the Waffen-SS), but it was still a pretty good movie.
But if you are in Kashmir, you can’t go see it. The reason for that is that the long, bloody, vicious campaign of Islamist terrorism inflicted on Kashmir means that there are no movie theaters — they were all shuttered by Islamist militants who object to cinema as un-Islamic, or they were simply burned down or bombed. The Economist reports that the only movie theater currently operating anywhere in Kashmir is in a government compound inaccessible to the general public.
Say what you will about The Kashmir Files, Modi and his BJP, Hindutva, and all the rest of it, the people of India — and the United States, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, etc. — did not dream up Islamist terrorism, and they are not wrong to be angry about it. The people of the Kashmir Valley — people who are 95 percent Muslim — have suffered very much from violence and militancy. More than most, in fact.
Because it has been more than 20 years since 9/11, Americans have politically and emotionally moved on from jihadism and Islamism. The people of India do not have that luxury. I am not entirely sure that we actually have that luxury, either.