'The Kashmir Files' director Vivek Agnihotri sends defamation notice to Mamata Banerjee

The Kashmir Files and Tashkent Files director Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri announced that he would be sending a legal notice to West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee for her defamatory comments on The Kashmir Files. 

“I have, along with @AbhishekOfficl & Pallavi Joshi, sent a LEGAL NOTICE to the Chief Minister, Bengal @MamataOfficial for her false & highly defamatory statements made with malafide intention to defame us & our films #TheKashmirFiles & upcoming 2024 film #TheDelhiFiles,” the director said in a tweet dated May 9, 2023. 

The director’s response comes in light of CM Mamata Banerjee’s comments at a press conference in Nabanna where she stated that Kashmir Files existed to ‘humiliate one section’ of society. She lumped Kashmir Files and Kerala Story into a list of movies that present ‘distorted’ stories to the audiences. The CM alleged that the film was funded by the Bhartiya Janata Party, a claim that Vivek disputes in his legal notice. 

In the legal notice sent by Vivek Agnihotri and his team, the team dissected the claims made by Mamata Banerjee over the last couple of years following the release of ‘The Kashmir Files’. The team called the CM’s statements "false, baseless and far away from the truth". They alleged also that her 'defamatory' comments were made in order to gain ‘easy popularity among so called seculars’ in the country. 

The notice also demands an unconditional apology from the CM, one with the same amount of publicity that her comments received. 

In a press conference held in Nabanna, CM Mamata Banerjee questioned the authenticity of films like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files, believing the films to be a pretext for humiliating certain sections of society. 

The Kerala Story was pushed into the spotlight after it was accused of falsifying statistics by presenting itself as a story of 32,000 Hindu women, who were forced to convert to Islam and, later, join the terror group, ISIS. After a huge backlash, and with many experts, which included Congress leader Sashi Tharoor, pointing out the fallacy of the number '32,000', the makers of the film

later retracted their comments and claim, saying instead that the movie was a story of 3 women. This threw the film under immense scrutiny in the political landscape, with the matter going all the way up to the Supreme Court. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan called the film ‘propaganda’ by ‘the Sangh Parivar’.