1 week Ago By Firstpost
Dozens of tourists, including a few honeymooners, were soaking in the atmosphere in one of the world’s most picturesque locations, a lush valley surrounded by mountains in Pahalgam, Kashmir. Their joy was short lived. In a few moments three terrorists, Muslims all, descended from the pine forests.
They were armed to the teeth, carrying state-of-the art weapons and bodycam. The jihadis rounded up the unsuspecting, panic-stricken tourists on the grassy meadow of Baisaran Valley, some of whom cowered in fear inside tents, and pumped 60 rounds of ammunition killing 26 people on the spot while sparing the women and children. These were not indiscriminate bullets.
Each of the victims were Hindus. Some were asked to recite Islamic verses and summarily executed in front of their relatives when they failed. Some stripped of their dignity to check whether they were circumcised before being killed.
One Hindu brahmin, a professor, managed to survive because he could recite the ‘kalima’. The assassins, laughing casually and shooting the helpless, mortally scared holidaymakers, spared his life when the professor started loudly reciting the Islamic verses. Others weren’t so lucky.
Santosh Jagdale, a 54-year-old businessman from Pune holidaying with his daughter Asavari, didn’t know the kalima. Asavari told the media that Jagdale was shot thrice for his ‘crime’, and then the Islamist killers shot her uncle, lying on the ground next to her, “several times in the back”. Pallavi and Manjuanth Rao and their young son had travelled from Karnataka to the valley in Kashmir, called ‘Mini Switzerland’, and were enjoying the time of their lives.
When her husband was gunned down by the terrorists because he was a Hindu, Pallavi begged them to kill her too. One of jihadis told her , “I won’t kill you. Go tell this to Modi.
” A similar fate befell Bengaluru based techie, whose name “Bharath Bhushan” was enough for the terrorists to shoot him thrice on the head. Lt Vinay Narwal from Karnal had recently married Gurgaon girl Himanshi. The couple wanted to go to Europe for their honeymoon but were denied visas.
They flew to Kashmir instead. The image of a dazed Himanshi sitting beside the lifeless body of her husband became a totem of the orgy of violence. Florida-based techie Bitan Adhikary, originally from Kolkata, kept quiet when the Islamist assassins asked him to reveal his religion.
Sohini, his wife, told media that the terrorist who shot her husband had a video camera strapped to forehead. Only one Muslim man fell to the bullets. Pony rider Adil Hussain Shah, a brave, conscientious man, instead of fleeing from the scene tried to help the tourists take cover and accosted one terrorist.
He was ‘rewarded’ with multiple shots for trying to save the kuffar. Readers, I am not skilful enough to reproduce in words the horror that befell the victims on that fateful day. You must have seen, through countless video clips on social media, the blood splattered grass, the lifeless bodies of men lying contorted in the grip of death, their brains spilling out from headshots.
Those who died, died. They leave behind unfinished stories and lifelong trauma for their parents, children, wives, daughters and kin. What could be even worse than this tragedy? Can there be anything even more tragic? There is.
Denial of terrorism is perhaps even worse than the act of terrorism itself. To deny an atrocity is to repudiate what is owed to those affected by the crime. In Pahalgam, unarmed, defenceless, ordinary civilians were selectively butchered by Islamist mujahideens for the ’crime’ of being Hindus.
To deny this fact is to cause moral injury, to reject outright the lived reality of the survivors, to desecrate the memory of the departed and encourage a revisionist history. Atrocity denial is not only an act of devastating moral turpitude, but what Elie Wiesel has called “double killing” , the negation of the “moral necessity of remembering”. And since the day of the tragedy in Kashmir, Western legacy media (especially the American outlets) are guilty of each and every act of atrocity denial.
This nihilistic negation of reality by publications such as CNN, Associated Press, New York Times etc., occurs at different levels through subtle manipulation of language that confuses, obfuscates, minimizes and finally trivializes the scale and magnitude of the tragedy. This manipulation is both textual and contextual, distorting reality through a linguistic strategy that alters the nomenclature and interpretation of things.
For example, if one can establish through reportage that the terrorists indulged in indiscriminate spraying of bullets, then the lived reality of Hindus being singled out for murder is contested. The reality, that of the targeted cleansing of a particular group motivated by religious hatred with support from an adversarial state across the border, is replaced by an act of random bloodletting that trivializes the enormity of the tragedy and erases the identity of victims. The aim is to ultimately shape the ‘seeing’ and ‘interpreting’ of the massacre of Hindus at the hands of Muslim fanatics through a discourse that has an impact on public’s social cognition and value judgment.
For the Western media that feeds off Western academic discourse, not all identities have the same grading. Hindus can only be pretenders, never the real victims because they have never faced systemic oppression. Therefore, the language is carefully modified to deny Hindus the victimhood, and the religious identity of the victims obfuscated and sanitized to paint a picture of arbitrary violence within an oppressor-oppressed framework, where the Indian state is guilty of oppression, and the Islamist terrorists window-dressed as “rebels”, “militants” or gunmen” who are out to air their grievances with the aid of bullets.
In this telling, the victims are not really victims or innocent tourists, but “collaborators” of the oppressor state who deserved their fate. Lest the reader thinks I am exaggerating the perversion, let me quote a few passages from a reportage of the incident by reporters Aijaz Hussain, Sheikh Saaliq and Rajesh Roy for American media outlet Associated Press. “India blamed Pakistan on Wednesday for a militant attack that killed 26 people in Indian-held Kashmir, downgrading diplomatic ties and suspending a crucial water-sharing treaty that has withstood two wars between the nuclear-armed rivals.
The spray of gunfire at tourists Tuesday in a scenic, mountain-ringed valley was the worst assault in years targeting civilians in the restive region that is claimed by both countries.” Note the phrases “militant attack” and “spray of gunfire” and reference to the victims solely as “tourists”. The word ‘militant’, a deliberate misdirection, carries none of the stigma attached with “terrorists”, and refers to aggressor who typically take up arms against an oppressor state or an occupying force.
This word, along with the phrase “Indian-held Kashmir”, not only plays down the heinousness of the crime, but simultaneously subverts India’s sovereignty by refusing to acknowledge that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of India. There’s more. The referring of anti-Hindu violence by Islamist radicals as “spray of gunfire” is a wilful erasure of victims’ identity and the worst form of atrocity denial.
The AP report doubles down on this malicious narrative when it claims: “Police called the assault a “terror attack” and blamed militants fighting against Indian rule. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh vowed to “not only trace those who perpetrated the attack but also trace those who conspired to commit this nefarious act on our soil.” Kashmir Resistance, a previously unknown militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack on social media.
The group said Indian authorities had settled over 85,000 “outsiders” in the region and claimed that those targeted on Tuesday were not “ordinary tourists” but “were linked to and affiliated with Indian security agencies.” The group’s messages could not be independently verified. Earlier this month, the local government told its legislature that 83,742 Indians were granted rights to buy land and property in Kashmir in the last two years.
” Observe AP’s treachery. The news agency fails to mention even once that the tourists who were executed in cold blood by Islamists terrorists were Hindus, even quoting the terrorist outfit that has claimed responsibility for the carnage to suggest that the hapless victims were no “ordinary tourists” but “were linked to and affiliated with Indian security agencies.” The act of justifying the terror attack by skilfully suggesting that the victims were “settlers” or “collaborators” is not only morally reprehensible, but it sets new lows of human depravity in the name of “journalism”.
This isn’t journalistic diligence, caution or objectivity but a duplicitous misinterpretation of facts to propagate a certain kind of discourse that sits on a specific narrative structure. This structure ordains that Muslims enjoy unimpeachable claims of victimhood, and any inconvenient fact that challenges that narrative must be clipped, retrofitted or reframed to conform to the established structure. Under these circumstances admitting that only Hindu males were massacred in Kashmir – a state that has witnessed ethnic cleansing of Hindus – would be no less than sacrilege.
Therefore, AP had no choice but to act as the de facto propaganda arm of The Resistance Front (TRF) that enjoys deep links with Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiyaba (LeT), a US and UN-designated terrorist organization. The report also puts the word “terror attack” under scare quotes and attributes it to the police, raising doubts over the act of terrorism itself. In its ‘picture story’ of the tragedy, none of the pictures selected by the AP newsroom depicts the murder of a tourist, even though 25 of the 26 men killed were Hindus, including a Nepali national.
Most pictures of grief are of the relatives of pony rider Aadil Shah, the lone Muslim killed in the carnage. Not that the pain of Shah’s relatives is any less, but it cannot be a coincidence that none of the victims targeted for their religion, their brains bashed in by jihadi bullets from point-blank range, found space in this picture story. Only one depicts a Hindu mourner.
For good measure, AP’s selection of pictures includes a group of men sloganeering against Pakistan, sporting red tilak and a pumped fist, an almost picture-perfect representation of aggressive “Hindu nationalists”, the kind of people who have elected a strongman to power. Notice how deftly AP editors have turned a momentous act of anti-Hindu violence into Muslim victimhood. I have elaborated on AP’s examples, a particularly specious, spiteful and disgusting brand of “journalism” that spreads fake news with malicious intent, but other outlets are no better.
The New York Times, a known offender, got publicly ticked off by US House Committee on Foreign Affairs that enjoys a Republican majority. “Hey, @nytimes we fixed it for you. This was a TERRORIST ATTACK plain and simple.
Whether it’s India or Israel, when it comes to TERRORISM the NYT is removed from reality,” posted the handle on social media platform X, referring to an NYT headline that referred to the killers as “militants”, not “terrorists”. NYT, always a trendsetter, managed to water down the most crucial aspect of the violence in its report, that it was a targeted massacre of Hindus, by presenting it almost as hearsay. “General Hooda said the fact that the victims were civilians, and that witness accounts in Indian media suggested Hindus had been singled out by the militants, had only added to the pressure.
” These selective terminologies, narrative subterfuges, semantic chicaneries employed by Western media to deny or distort atrocities against Hindus point to the inevitable conclusion that in Western gaze, identity politics determine victimhood, and in Victimhood Olympics Hindus cannot hope for a podium finish even though they suffer massacre, ethnic cleansing or genocide. Their lived realities will be distorted, facts erased, layers of fake interpretations added till everything fits into the ‘correct’ framework. In this framework, Hindus are “extremists” even when they act in self-defence, and their very expression of grief is a threat to India’s secular fabric.
The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author.
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