I am deeply, deeply sorry

I had begun to write a blog on the aftermath of the Pahalgam incident but as India declared war on Pakistan by striking areas on the border towns inside the country what I had wanted to say became even more urgent. This attack injured scores of civilians and killed a woman and child. The military action against Pakistan is called Operation Sindoor, sindoor being the red vermilion that Hindu women in northern India use in the parting of their hair to denote that they are married. Since the stated objective of the Indian government was retaliation for the people killed in Pahalgam the use of the term Sindoor to refer to the war is pure jingoism. The war is being fought in the name of women who were widowed by the Pahalgam incident and won’t be wearing sindoor anymore but it is only certain kinds of women who are being invoked. The blog I was writing becomes for me even more relevant now because in the aftermath of the Pahalgam incident a war has been raging in the country against Indian Muslims. And now with a war on Pakistan, Indian Muslims are even more in danger. Most of the 26 people killed in Pahalgam on 22 April were tourists from different parts of India and were from the majority religious community, Hindus. 

 

I want to write saying how sorry I  am about the terror that has been visited on Indian Muslims who now are by default being made to bear the responsibility of the militant attack that killed people in Pahalgam. I am sorry too for those of us who continue to believe in the idea of India which is plural and secular that incidents like in Pahalgam unleash every single time an enormous tsunami of hatred, animosity and danger for all of us but especially for some of us who are in the direct firing line, the Indian Muslim. I am deeply, deeply sorry. 

 

For those of us like me who live in a household with friends who are our family and who happen to be Muslim there seems to be no way to protect them, to shield them from deep hurt because social media give us no respite. When these incidents occur Islamophobia or our very own Indian brand of it, communalism, goes on overdrive threatening to breakdown the door and drag us out and lynch us. And it’s easy to say that we should go offline, not watch the endless debates, put our mobiles on airplane mode but in an atmosphere so threatening it’s not possible to shut out the cacophony of ugliness. The stress, the anxiety of living with the hate has entered our souls. I am deeply, deeply sorry.

 

The reporting on the Pahalgam incident and the incidents before that, for example the Pulwama attack in 2019 were very similar. The hype in the aftermath of both incidents was immediately focused on Muslims pan-India because the militants were Muslim. In the Pahalgam incident it is said that the militants asked people about their religion before killing them. The Kashmiri (presumably Muslim) who hired out ponies to tourists for the climb  was also murdered because he talked back to the militants. His religion did not save him. But in all the reporting and social media chatter what is stressed is that Hindus were killed and by association that Muslims (no matter where they live in India) were murderers.  It has even found its way into Wikipedia which describes the incident as “an attack on non-Muslim tourists by five armed militants”. The horrendous tragedy of helpless tourists being mowed down by gunmen is reduced to a lurid communal tale. What followed was according to me a metaphorical blood bath in which the usual suspects – the right-wing mainstream media, the politicians of the ruling party, and the rabidly right-wing groups on social media – slaughtered the Indian Muslim and left us no choice as to how and for whom we should grieve. Liberals and secularists were either complicit in their silence or silenced by the incessant trolling. Himanshi Narwal whose husband a naval officer was among those killed in Pahalgam gave a public statement asking people to not hold Kashmiris and Indian Muslims responsible for the tragedy. She was brutally trolled on social media; even an edited version by Ravish Kumar one of our only independent journalists who runs his own channel was heart breaking to listen to. In the same broadcast Ravish Kumar highlights that the minister of Defence had said that the government’s response would be according to what the nation wanted and asks who comprises this nation. Is Himanshi Narwal part of the nation and is not what she wanted also what the nation wants? Or was the defence minister only thinking of his constituency the war mongering right wing trolls as the nation.

 

In the immediate aftermath the reporting even in the mainstream media was that Muslim militants killed Hindu tourists. This emotive media discussion completely obscured questions about culpability. This militant attack was not a new phenomenon; militancy has been on-going for many decades and major incidents like Pulwama in 2019 occur from time to time. Which is why India has turned Kashmir into a highly militarised state, abrogated democratic rights of the people and ruined the economy. The place is crawling with Indian security personnel who probably in some hamlets and villages outnumber the local population that they spy on. Are we really expected to believe that they had no inkling that the most popular tourist spot in Kashmir, Pahalgam, might be a vulnerable spot or was it just sheer incompetence given that the huge apparatus of intelligence and military might failed to anticipate and then to deal with the incident. 

 

When terrorist attacks occur in Kashmir the favourite whipping boy is of course Pakistan. By blaming Pakistan and holding it responsible for promoting terrorism and militancy in Kashmir the government  deflects attention from its own security failures. This time the pressure was on the present right-wing government to give a muscular response. The first thing they did was cancel the long-term visas of Pakistan nationals living in India and told them to return to Pakistan. Most of the people affected were women married to Indian men. Saira and Farhan fell in love via Facebook, got married and Saira moved to Delhi to be with Farhan. They started a family and have a ten-month-old child Aslan who is still being breast-fed. Farhan bade Saira and Aslan farewell at the border promising to meet up soon. As mother and child crossed the border the guards detained them because whereas Saira had a green passport (Pakistan) Aslan has a blue one (Indian). He was taken away from his mother and given to Farhan (Source: Al Jazeera). The muscular response of a right-wing government amounted to penalising countless women and children. Also affected were those with serious illnesses who had travelled to India to avail of medical services. A second measure amounted to what would be considered water terrorism; India abrogated the existing agreement to share the water of the Indus and its tributaries with Pakistan. This agreement has never been touched even in the worst of times, for example, the war of 1975. 

 

When Pulwama happened in 2019 a whole army convoy was attacked by militants; it was a huge, unforgivable security failure. The leader of the opposition was one of the important voices pointing to this failure and it cost his party the general election that year. The right-wing successfully turned the rhetoric around to militancy, Pakistan and terrorism and a jingoistic call for unity of the nation. This time the opposition has supported the government in its muscular response. There is a lot at stake for the ruling right-wing party and they will turn the hyper nationalism evoked by a war into an advantage in the upcoming elections in important states. It will also help the leadership to appease the extreme right-wing groups who through their social media channels are powerful enough to influence policy. These groups have in recent times become disillusioned by the leadership of the right-wing party in power for what they consider as betrayal of Hindus. They have mounted a non-stop campaign for some time now heckling the government to take harsher measures against Indian Muslims; with the Pahalgam incident their patience with the leaders has reached its limit. Dubbing the prime minister a Maulana Modi they have sworn to bring him down. (Source: The Print ‘From [destroyer of GC Hindus] to Maulana Modi jibes, BJP’s new opposition is arising from within’ accessed  on  https://theprint.in/politics/from-destroyer-of-gc-hindus-to-maulana-modi-jibes-bjps-new-opposition-is-arising-from-within/2599019/

 

As the spectre of right-wing fascism seems to overwhelm us we have to remember that we have been here before and that there has been push back by the citizens. I take heart that there are many grassroot level groups that have resisted the onslaught in the most difficult of places for example in UP. I appeal to our politicians who still believe in democracy and a secular dispensation to put their differences aside and prepare to confront the right-wing politically, through the vote, through Parliament and with all the democratic means available to us. Cutting the ruling party from its source of power, the state, is urgent. Rebuilding and holding together the fragile fabric of our relationships with each other is an urgent on-going task. All wars are wrong but this war is very wrong and will change the country for a long time to come because it is against citizens, the Muslims of India.

 

As I write this sitting in Europe, Europeans are commemorating 80 years of the end of the war, May 4, 1945, and remembering the genocide that that annihilated the European Jews. And yet in this short space of time the lessons seem to have been forgotten. There is war in Europe and a genocide has been in progress in Gaza that nobody seems to be able to stop. Yesterday BBC radio interviewed a government spokesperson asking for evidence that Pakistan harboured training camps for militants and therefore the basis for the Indian attack. In his reply the government spokesperson wanted to go back to the  history of Pakistani involvement in cross border militancy which the BBC reporter did not allow. Under pressure the spokesperson said that the situation in Kashmir was similar to that in the Israel-Palestine conflict where Muslim militancy had terrorised Israel so that Israel was forced to retaliate. Was India following this precedent the reporter asked.  Yes, squealed the spokesperson, India was justified in so doing since Muslim terrorists had killed Hindus. Here we are back to the in the Middle Ages and the Crusades when Europeans sent their soldiers to rid the Holy Land of  Muslims. This time round it is the democratic, secular Republic of India citing religion to declare war to avenge the death of Hindus.

 

The world over there is a rise of right extremism fuelling xenophobia as a way to achieve power. And Muslims have become the target.