'I have watched Haider and it is political. It is neither a documentary nor is it a propaganda film. The political undertones are subtle at most places but the movie sporadically erupts into making overtly political statements: disappeared people, half-widows, unmarked graves, AFSPA, the army's creation of counterinsurgent group, Ikhwaan and perhaps the most controversial of them all, the torture scenes.
'To anyone who has read Basharat Peer (author of Curfewed Night) or other "Kashmiri" writers, this should not come as a surprise. It is the standard viewpoint of middle-class, educated young men from Srinagar who came of age in the early 1990s, when the militancy was at its peak in the state. The movie stays true to that political viewpoint and captures many truths of that period. But it is not the complete truth.'