"To an extent, The Kashmir Files, a recent film by Vivek Agnihotri, has tried to reset the Kashmiri Hindu narrative, and that is why so many are rattled by it. Many prominent Kashmiri voices, politicians, intellectuals, writers and poets—all those who stayed silent even as the Kashmiri Hindu genocide unfolded right before their eyes—called for a ban on the film. To them I ask—can there be reconciliation without remembrance? Crime without comeuppance? Can there be death without deliverance? Can there be justice without Nuremberg? Why do they want to hide the truth about the Nadimarg massacre that the film truthfully depicts, where terrorist Zia Mustafa lined up 23 unsuspecting Kashmiri Hindus and shot them point blank, and as he was escaping, he heard a baby cry and his comrade goaded ‘ye karnawun chupe’ and then the baby became the 24th victim. Why do they want to hide this? Why do they want to hide the truth about Girija Tickoo, who was raped and cleaved in two by a mechanical saw while she was still alive? Why do they want to hide the truth about B.K. Ganjoo, who hid inside a rice barrel when jihadis came looking for him after his Muslim neighbour informed on him? Ganjoo was shot dead. Rice laced with his blood was fed to his wife. Why do they want to hide the truth about slogans raised from mosques on 19 January 1990—“Ralive, Tsalive, Galive [convert, run or die]; ‘Death to kafirs’; Pandits go but leave your women behind’; Nizam-e-Mustafa!’ Why do they want to hide all this? And what is this other side of the genocide that they demand should also be shown? Yasin Malik, the assassin of Squadron leader Khanna, loved dum aloo? Bitta Karate, the killer of Kashmiri Hindus, was the son of a shawl weaver? Zia Mustafa, the perpetrator of the Nadimarg massacre, was a compounder at a hospital? I will tell you why they want this truth to be hidden. Because they realise that The Kashmir Files is not just a film, it is a Proustian collection of memories. Of Girija. Of Ganjoo. Of Dinanath. Of tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus who were betrayed by their own friends. But they forget. They might have taken away from the Kashmiri Hindus their home, but they can never take away from them their words. For their entrapment in a film may fool us into believing they have a physical form, a form that can be destroyed when the film is destroyed. But the words existed much before their prisons did. Words never die. They always survive. In times of terror, we wrap them and hide them like our ancestors did, and it may take 30 or 300 or 3,000 years for them to be uttered again—but uttered again they will be. And when they are, their words will echo in the valleys of violence where people only know how to light Molotov these words will make them light diyas again."