Junooniyat team caught in a crossfire while shooting in Kashmir

What started off as a routine outdoor schedule for director Vivek Agnihotri and his lead pair Pulkit Samrat and Yami Gautam, became a nightmare while shooting in Kashmir last week.

Apparently, the unit of Vivek Agnihotri’s Junooniyat was hounded and attacked by locals for having Kashmiri girls in a song sequence.

Vivek says, “It was all smooth in Sonmarg and we thought, ‘Wow, how different the reality is from the perception of Kashmir.”

However, after a shooting a song where around 20 Kashmiri girls participated, as the unit was moving from Sonmarg, their vehicles were surrounded by around 100 Kashmiri men with burning torches demanding that the Kashmiri girls be handed over to them.

Vivek says, “It’s not that the Kashmiris don’t want their womenfolk to work in films. They’re okay with women working in Kashmiri films, but not Hindi films.” Vivek adds, “There were around 100 men with torches pounding on the windows of our cars demanding that we hand over the Kashmiri girls to them. Fortunately, they had finished their work and were not with us. If they were with us they would have been thrashed by their own men.”

After this incident, the rest of the shooting was undertaken under the strictest of arrangements.

“We were surrounded by security personnel in Srinagar and Pahalgam. It took us seven hours to reach the airport the day we were leaving because Modiji was coming that day.”

In spite of these glitches Vivek is all set to return to Kashmir next year for the last schedule of Junooniyat.