Pahalgam and after – the singular burden of apology

The true mettle of a people is most tested amidst the raging fires of mind-numbing tragedy and loss. More so when lives that are most precious to us are snatched not by the furies of nature, not by the ravages of illness, but by ferocious mindless hate.

After the brutal terror slaughter of at least 26 men in Kashmir on April 22, many parts of India were swept up in an inferno of hate. Twenty-five of them were tourists, and one was a Kashmiri pony worker who lost his life trying to save the tourists. But the loved ones of those suddenly brutally slayed and the ordinary people of Kashmir elevated the moral bar sky-high.

Lieutenant Vinay Narwal was just short of 27 years old. A young naval officer from a village in Karnal in Haryana, he was posted in the Kochi port in Kerala. Married to Himanshi a week earlier, they chose the scenic climes of Kashmir for their honeymoon after they could not arrange a visa on time to travel to Switzerland. They made an achingly handsome couple – photographs show their faces lit up with happiness.

The couple was enjoying bhel puri at a stall in the Baisaran meadows of Pahalgam, fabled for its beauty. What followed was beyond the most horrific of nightmares. A man walked up to them, asked Narwal his religion, and then shot him dead, after which he quietly walked away. Utterly distraught and uncomprehending, Himanshi sat wordlessly beside her husband’s bleeding body sprawled in the meadow until the police arrived an hour later.

Himanshi was understandably inconsolable when her husband was cremated in his village. But when journalists gathered around her days later in a blood donation camp that the family had organised in Karnal to mark Narwal’s 27th birthday, this is what she had to say: “This going against Kashmiris and Muslims, we don’t want this. We want peace and only peace”. She added, “Of course we want justice. The people who have wronged him should be punished.”

Her singular grace, stoicism and humanity set off a storm of rage and abuse on social media by right-wing channels which has not ended even days later, as I write this. One post even suggested that she be shot, others claimed wildly that she said what she did because she was paid off or she wanted to marry again, or because she had Muslim men friends in college. But Himanshi was resolute. She said to a journalist, “I know what I said and why I said it. I don’t want innocent lives to be impacted by this, whether Hindu or Muslim.”

But Lalita Ramdas wrote an iridescent open letter to her, in which she spoke for what I believe are the majority of the Indian people. She wrote: “You are the perfect Fauji wife Himanshi, true to the spirit of the service, the Constitution and to our secular values.”

Both Lalita Ramdas’s father and husband were chiefs of the Indian Navy (the first and the 13th). Ramdas is herself a veteran social activist of repute. She added in her letter to Himanshi, “This is a personal tribute from possibly one of the oldest Navy daughters/wives alive today… to the newest and youngest among the special fraternity of Naval wives. I am so proud of you as I watch the clip of your words to the press, over and over again. Your extraordinary strength, composure and conviction when you speak out against hate and targeting of Muslims and Kashmiris after the horrific killing of so many innocent men in Pahalgam on the 22nd is truly remarkable. And so badly needed in our times.”

She wrote further, “‘We only want peace’, you said, and of course rightly. ‘We want justice too.’ You are clearly a woman who knows her mind, and there could not have been a more courageous partner of a Navy man like Vinay. You have echoed the thoughts and feelings of every thinking citizen of this country. And we should all take your message of love and compassion far and wide.”

Himanshi’s uncommon humanism was shared by many other victims of the terror attack. That fateful morning, Arathi Menon, a resident of Kochi who works in Dubai, was holidaying in Kashmir with her parents and twin six-year-old sons. Her mother stayed back in the car while Menon walked in the Baisaran meadows with her father 65-year-old N Ramachandran and her sons. When they first heard the gunshots, they thought it was fireworks. But as these persisted, the realisation dawned that it was a terror attack. People scattered in panic in all directions.

“As we were moving, a man emerged from the woods. He looked straight at us,” she recalled later to the New Indian Express. The stranger spoke words they couldn’t understand. They replied, we don’t know. “The next moment, he opened fire. My father collapsed beside us. I saw two men, but they weren’t wearing any soldier’s uniform. My sons started screaming, and the man walked off. I knew my father was gone. I grabbed the boys and just ran – into the forest, with no idea where I was going”, and described how they ran for nearly an hour through the wilderness. “The ponies had started running too, and I just followed their footprints.”

When they finally reached a place where her phone caught the internet, she called their driver, Musafir. “My driver Musafir and another man, Sameer – they became my brothers. They stood by me through everything, took me to the mortuary, helped with the formalities…(we) waited there till 3 am. They took care of me like a sister,” she recalled. As she left Srinagar, Menon said to them: “I have two brothers in Kashmir now. May Allah protect you both.”

Arvind Agrawal, a member of the Chhattisgarh BJP youth wing had a similar story to tell. He wrote on his Facebook page: “You risked your life to save ours. We will never be able to thank Nazakat bhai enough.”

Agrawal was holidaying with 11 members of his family. When the gunshots started, his four-year-old daughter Samriddhi ran into the open ground. His wife Pooja ran after her to rescue her. Other children were playing in the ground, and with them was Nazakat, a pony owner. As the terrorists approached, he picked up Agrawal’s daughter and told the terrorists that she was his own daughter. “He left after,” Agrawal recalled. “The local ponywallahs then helped us escape on ponies.” They later helped take his wife to the hospital, because she had fractured her shoulder.

By then Nazakat got the news that his cousin Adil was killed by the terrorists as he tried to save the lives of the tourists. But he decided not to return home for Adil’s funeral, because Agrawal and his family were petrified to travel in Kashmir without a Kashmiri local. Nazakat dropped the family at the airport before he finally returned home. The attacks, he said, “marks the death of humanity, and it should not have happened at any cost. I just find happiness in the fact that I could rescue those 11 people and make sure they reached home safely”.

Syed Adil Shah, a humble 29-year-old pony handler who would ferry tourists on ponies, emerged as a national hero after he was killed by terrorists in Pahalgam. He did not own a pony, instead was a daily-wager who hired ponies, earning maybe Rs 300 a day. He left that morning with his lunch packed in a tiffin.

When the terrorists started shooting the tourists, he tried to snatch one of their rifles. The gunman pumped three bullets into him, leaving him dead. “He left home that morning after three days of rain to take tourists around on his pony as usual,” his father, Syed Haidar Shah sobbed, in their small home on the wooded slopes. “Who knew that this was the last time?”

His grieving family said they were proud of his sacrifice. “He showed his humanity, and that allows us to live on,” his father said. “He sacrificed his own life while trying to save innocent visitors.” His son had a very “sharp sense of right and wrong”. “We are not alone in our grief,” Shah added. “There are 25 other families (grieving the loss of their loved ones), but I am proud of what my son did”.

Yet another Facebook post, this time from a Maharashtra family, read, “We survived…because a Kashmiri brother gave us shelter in his house. Adil, their taxi driver became their protector after the terror attack. He took the frightened family to his home, and offered them reassurance, and shelter. A woman says in a video, “Adil Bhai kept us in his house, gave us food, and took us to a safe place. He kept encouraging us from the morning”.

There was a flood of such stories.

Another video that went viral was of Sajad Ahmad Bhat, a shawl hawker from Pahalgam, who carried an injured tourist on his back running for an hour until he reached a motorable road. He was one of the first to rush to the site of the slaughter to see how we could help. “It was our duty as Kashmiris to save them,” he said. “This was murder of humanity.”. Bhat was not alone. Many pony-wallahs (pony guides), all-terrain vehicle operators, and local shopkeepers – rushed to the spot to save the lives of the wounded tourists.

The highways became clogged with escaping tourists. Tourists in places like Gulmarg, Sonamarg, Srinagar, Doodhpathri and other resorts were desperate to flee from Kashmir. It was then that Kashmiris across the valley opened the doors to their homes to shelter, feed and comfort the stranded and frightened visitors.

They also lined the highways with food supplies. The Quint reports, “Even as the Valley was shut down in protest, locals were seen distributing fruits, water, and other essentials to tourists at multiple locations, especially in South Kashmir”. People opened free food kiosks along the roadsides.

One of these was Bashrat Maqbool, from Shopian district who leads a social welfare group called the Keegam Youth Trust. “Since the Valley was shut”, he said, “we pooled money from our own pockets and bought fruits, water, and other items to distribute among the tourists rushing toward the airport. Autorickshaws and taxis were providing free rides to tourists heading to the Srinagar airport and railway station.”

The whole of Kashmir shut down in spontaneous protest against the killings. “People express(ed) their grief and outrage with placards, banners, posters, and slogans calling for justice and peace…The shutdown was unlike anything seen before. Kashmiris came out, en masse, to protest and mourn the deaths of innocent tourists, whom they called their “guests”. They held rallies and candlelight marches, unanimously condemning the massacre. All shops, business establishments, and schools across the 10 districts of Kashmir remained closed. Even public transport remained off the roads”. Shoaib Mehraj, a resident of Srinagar declared, “We aren’t responsible for it but since this attack happened in Kashmir, we feel we owe an apology to our guests.”

But engineered hate also quickly took its toll. Despite the luminous humanity, solidarity, heartbreak and remorse displayed by the Kashmiri people, both governments and right-wing formations meted out collective punishment on Kashmiris and Muslims across the country. Blood was spilt, poisonous hate speech peaked, students harassed and intimidated, patients turned away, homes demolished, and prisons packed in collective retribution for crimes that people neither committed nor endorsed.

Less than 24 hours after the Pahalgam terror attack, a 25-year-old restaurant worker in Agra, Mohammad Ghulfam, was about to shut the Shahid Ali Chicken Biryani restaurant for the night when two men came into the eatery. One of them took out a gun and shot Ghulfam who collapsed in a pool of blood. His cousin was sweeping the floor in another restaurant Tajpur heard the gunshots and stepped out to check what had happened. The gunmen shot at him as well, and a bullet grazed his shoulder as he ducked for safety under a table.

Ghulfam leaves behind three children. His mother Zubaida wailed in their home, beating her chest, just two kilometres away from the Taj Mahal. “My son was a simple boy. Why was he killed?”

A day later, a man in a blue vest and jeans appeared in a video on social media. Two pistols were tucked into his jeans. He claimed to be a member of the Kshatriya Gau Raksha Dal in Agra. Taking responsibility for the murder, he declared he would avenge the Pahalgam terror attack by “killing 2,600 [Muslims] in retaliation for 26 [tourists killed in Kashmir]”.

A chillingly similar slogan “26 ke badle 26 marunga” – I will kill 26 in return for 26 – was raised by another killer Govind in Jhinjhana village of Shamli in Uttar Pradesh. Without warning he assaulted another villager named Sarfaraz with an axe, hacking him repeatedly on his face, neck, and shoulders.”

The India Hate Lab reports a deluge of hate speech, with 64 in-person hate speech events in just the 10 days that immediately followed the Pahalgam terror strike. Most of these were in public rallies organised by Hindutva groups such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad, Rashtriya Bajrang Dal, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, Sakal Hindu Samaj, Hindu Rashtra Sena and Hindu Raksha Dal.

Muslims were described in these rallies in dehumanising language, as “green snakes”, “piglets”, “keede” (insects), and “mad dogs”. Similar language describing the Tutsi as “insects” notably preceded the genocide of a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

Many hate speeches in these rallies made open calls for genocide. Pushpendra Kulshrestha in Kondagaon, Chhattisgarh goaded audiences: “Don’t talk to the mad jihadis in your city; they can’t be spoken to, they have to be shot in the head.” In Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, religious leader Madhuram Sharan Shiva urged Hindus to prepare for war, declaring “You have to finish these adharmis…You all need to have weapons.” In a rally in Maharashtra, a speaker appealed to the government “to give the police a month’s vacation – then watch how we disappear these Pakistani landas not just from Maharashtra but from India.”

There were dire calls for economic boycott and ethnic cleansing, beside genocide. In Ambala, Haryana, a Hindu monk called for a complete boycott of Muslim vendors and businesses, urging that before making purchases people ask vendors their religion. He too threatened that if the government failed to act, Hindus would pick up weapons and “send them to Pakistan”. A similar call was made in Madhepura, Bihar.

In Loni, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, BJP legislator Nandkishor Gurjar asked participants to take an oath that they would identify and expel all those who “support Pakistan,” referring to them as “topiwallas,” “jihadis,” and “Rohingya Bangladeshis.” A speaker in Sarahan, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, called upon landlords to evict Muslim tenants, threatening that if they failed to do this, they would be the first to be expelled. In Kamshet, Pune, Maharashtra, at a rally by Hindu Rashtra Sena and Sakal Hindu Samaj, speakers targeted local Muslims with the claim that “Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are earning from this city,” and called for an economic boycott.

BJP minister in Maharashtra, Nitesh Rane, who is particularly notorious for hate speech, called for an economic boycott of Muslims, declaring in a gathering, “If (Muslims) are behaving this way about religion, then why should we buy things from them and make them rich? You people will have to take a pledge that whenever you make any purchase, you should buy it only from a Hindu.”

The weeks after the Pahalgam massacre also saw an explosion of dangerous hate posts targeting Kashmiris and Indian Muslims. Accounts of X called for an “Israel-like solution” in Kashmir, and advocated violence and even genocide. Social media posts stigmatised and abused Islam falsely claiming that the religion supports terror violence.

Among many hateful and bigoted messages, one Sonam Mahajan tweeted, “From Murshidabad to Pahalgam, terrorism has a religion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a pathological liar.” Another concurred, observing that “In our childhood, we were all scared before entering a Muslim colony or area.” Another posted – “Middle finger salute to your mosques and bhai chara.” Anand Ranganathan wrote, “Terrorism has no religion. That’s why Pahalgam terrorists checked the ID cards of tourists, pulled their pants down, asked them to recite kalma, and killed those not Muslims.” Another post claimed, “Every Kashmiri was involved in this massacre. Every Kashmiri did this.”

Nupur Sharma, editor of the Hindutva website Op India, directly attacked the Kashmiri people: “Nobody cares. Keep your candles (referring to their candle-light peace marches). Keep your apples. Keep your shawls. Keep your Kashmiriyat. Stop the bloody drama.”

Kunal Purohit, author of the landmark book H-Pop on popular hate culture, writing for Al Jazeera, found at least 20 incendiary hate-filled songs set to pulsing beats targeting Indian Muslims and Kashmiris after the Pahalgam terror assault. Less than 24 hours after the attack the first of these hate-songs surfaced on Indian YouTube.

We made a mistake by allowing you to stay on,
You got your own country, why didn’t you leave then?
They call us Hindus “kaffirs”,
Their hearts are full of conspiracies against us.

The message it blared out was obvious, that Hindus made a mistake to accept Muslims as Indian citizens when the country was partitioned in 1947; they should instead have been forced to leave for Pakistan.

Other songs urged Hindus to unite and rise, otherwise they would be “slaughtered”; described Indian Muslims as “traitors within the country” and “snakes”; and called upon Modi to stir a religious war and permit Hindus to carry weapons. Some songs called for “Pakistan to be nuked, or for the Indian government to “wipe Pakistan off the map”, and others advocated for “Pakistani blood” in exchange for the deaths.

There were also vile sexualised calls for rape and sexual violence against Kashmiri Muslim women. One tweet began encouragingly, “Any Kashmiri girl feeling threatened in Delhi can come to my house at night. You will be safe and well hosted. A divided India will lose, a United India will win & thrive!” However, he ominously added “But I can’t guarantee if she will be alive after spending a night with me”, and that “Hijabis are my priority.” Others similarly called for the sexual assault of Kashmiri women using revolting language and innuendos.

Many pages of Hindutva supporters with massive following openly called for a “Muslim massacre” on social media. To quote some, “Cut their hands and hang their bodies in Lal Chowk.” Another declared, “Hum bhi pant utaar kar dekhenge aur marenge.” We will also take down their pants and kill them.

“This is India’s October 7,” wrote another person on social media. Israel was frequently held up as a model of the Indian government. Many posts urged the Modi government to “take revenge the Israel way”. Several Hindutva leaders echoed this demand that the Indian government replicate in Kashmir the model of Israel’s actions in Gaza in retaliation for the Pahalgam violence.

Talk show hosts on a range of popular TV channels further raised the heat. One TV anchor went so far as to declare, “There needs to be a final solution”, meaning a Holocaust-like genocide.

The aftermath of the terror attacks also saw fearsome violence against Kashmiris, especially students, in other parts of India. Article 14 documents hate intimidation and attacks on Kashmiris and Kashmiri students in four northern states and Jammu. Each of these were spurred by Hindutva groups. “We spoke with Kashmiri students who had exams to write but had no institutional support. Hiding in their rooms, hoping for the worst to pass without violence, they spoke of mental and emotional trauma”.

Areeba, a 22-year-old student from Kashmir who lives in Chandigarh, recounts how strangers stopped her and violently pulled her out of her taxi, shouting, “You Kashmiris are the ones responsible for attacks like the one in Pahalgam; you support them.” Frightened by such attacks, Areeba, a radiology student at Rayat Bahra University, locked herself in her room. “We are stuck. We can’t go outside, and we can’t go home. Even booking a cab to the airport feels like risking our lives,” she said to Article 14, her voice breaking. “I feel like a prisoner here, just because I’m Kashmiri, just because I’m Muslim. This flat that was once my home feels like a cage now.”

Al Jazeera likewise reports that nearly a dozen Kashmiris who spoke with their reporters testified to locking themselves inside their rooms in at least seven cities of India, and avoiding any outside contact, including placing online orders or booking cabs.

Nasir Khuehami, the national convenor of Jammu & Kashmir Students Association, a Srinagar-based student union, said that they received between 600 to 700 calls daily, seeking assistance from Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu.

Hiding in her room was also Rukhsar Wani, a nursing student at Rahat Baharat University in Chandigarh. She wept as she recounted what happened when she stepped out to shop two days after the terror attack. “As soon as I stepped out, people started staring at me like I didn’t belong there. A group of men began abusing me, calling me names, shouting the worst things. I could hear the hate in their voices. It was not just words. It was a threat. I started shivering. I could not even walk properly. I froze. I kept thinking, ‘What did I do? What was my fault?’” Since then, she has not left her room. “I did not have the guts to step out. I just want to return to where I belong and feel safe. But I am stuck here and don’t know how long I can take this. I feel trapped in every way possible.”

Kashmiri male students felt the same way. Faizan Shafi, a 21-year-old student at the Himalayan Institute of Technology in Dehradun, said he had not stepped out of his hostel room since the attack, not even for food. “I feel like every eye on this campus is burning through me, like they all know where I am from and are just waiting. I hear footsteps outside and freeze.”

“I felt like every single person in the crowd had vengeance in their eyes,” said another Kashmiri student to Al Jazeera. “There is mistrust everywhere I look,” said yet another. “We are also cursed because our face and features give away our ethnicity.”

“After Pulwama in 2019, I remember hiding in my room for a week,” Junaid Bhat, a student at the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in Punjab said to Article 14. “Now it is happening again. We are either invisible or accused. There is no in-between.” Rumaisa Lone, a 28-year-old working professional in Delhi, went further. “We are not even allowed to mourn what happened back home,” he said. “Because the moment we express sorrow, they think we are faking it. They think we are part of it. How do you live in a place where even your grief is seen as guilt?”

Kashmiri students told Article 14 that people banged on their doors violently late at night, hurled slurs at them through the corridors, and slipped threatening notes slipped under doors. “They shouted things I can’t even repeat, filthy, hateful words just because we are Kashmiri. We did not sleep at all,” said a student. “We just sat huddled together, scared someone might actually come in.”

“We have never seen anything like this,” another said.

Not just students. Other Kashmiris and other Muslims also faced a surge of hate discrimination, abuse and violence. Sheikh Showkat, a Kashmiri political analyst and academic observed, “Kashmiris bear a double weight: of being a Kashmiri – and a Muslim. They are always the easy targets.”

Vishnu Gupta, the president of the Hindu Sena, threatened: “The attack in Kashmir was an attack on Hindus, and we will respond in kind – not only against Kashmiris but against every Muslim in India if the government does not take action. There should be a complete boycott of Kashmir by tourists to teach them a lesson. This is not merely a terrorist act but an Islamic terrorist act. If the government does not take action against the militants and their sympathisers, there will come a day when Hindus will react just as brutally against Muslims across India.”

“We won’t wait for the government to take action … Kashmiri Muslims, leave by 10 am, else you will face action you can’t imagine,” Lalit Sharma, the leader of the Hindu Raksha Dal threatened ominously in a video statement. “Tomorrow, all our workers will leave their homes to give this treatment to Kashmiri Muslims.”

People were shocked by a video that shows some men in Mussoorie thrashing two Kashmiri shawl sellers, demanding that they leave the town. The Quint reports that at least 15 or 16 such shawl sellers were attacked. One of them was Shabir Ahmed Dar who has been selling shawls in Uttarakhand for 20 years. He said one night a mob of 30 to 40 men, many of them brandishing sticks threatened him demanding they leave. He lamented, “Hum bhi iss mitti ke hi hai, humare saath aisa kyu horha hain? We are from this land. Why is this happening to us?) Whoever did the terror attack, it hurt us all. We have been opposing it openly. Those people are monsters, they are not Hindu or Muslim. But if we cannot work there, then where do we work? If we’re not safe in India, then where are we safe?”

Such attacks were reported from elsewhere as well. For instance, members of Hindutva organisations attacked and vandalised Muslim-owned shops and carts in Ambala in Haryana. They also beat and abused Muslims workers. Another video surfaced, again from Haryana, of two Muslim vendors being assaulted and harassed as an act of revenge for Pahalgam violence. A group of BJP leaders in Mumbai were apprehended by the police for abusing and assaulting Muslim hawkers in central Mumbai. A Jaipur rally protesting the terror attack in Pahalgam turned violent with mobsters trying to enter the Jama Masjid. A BJP legislator led the mob, entering the mosque to plaster hateful posters on its walls.

Two Muslim labourers working at a temple in Hathras in UP were removed after Pahalgam terror attack. A Hindutva leader Praveen Varshney announced that Muslims would no longer be hired for construction. “Anger over the terror attack is spreading across India,” he said to PTI. “The nation is demanding decisive government action against terrorism. Hindu labourers will complete the remaining work at the temple”.

The 15-year-old son of a daily wager in Aligarh on his way back from school was forced by a mob to urinate on a flag of Pakistan and raise slogans in praise of Pakistan. A video shows him terrified and begging the crowd to let him go with folded hands.

A poster appeared at the Bidhan Chandra Krishi Vishwavidyalaya in West Bengal with the words, “Dogs & Muslims not Allowed, #AllEyesOnPahalgam.” A senior gynaecologist and obstetrician in the Kasturi Das Memorial Super Speciality Hospital turned away a 7-month pregnant woman only because she was Muslim. She reportedly said that “after the Kashmir incident, I’m not going to see any Muslim patients. Hindus should kill your husband, then you’ll feel how they felt and we should banned (sic) all the Muslims”.

The Indian state, far from restraining and penalising such hateful unlawful collective retribution, instead further fanned the flames with its own statements and actions.

The prime minister himself set the tone for this public mood when in an address just a day after the attacks in Madhubani in poll-bound Bihar, he suddenly switched to English to issue this public warning. “Today, from the soil of Bihar I want to say to the whole world that India will identify, trace and punish every terrorist, supporter and conspirator. We’ll pursue them to the end of the earth. They will be punished beyond their imagination.” The perpetrators will face the “full might of India’s response”, he added.

Authorities reported a major crackdown in Kashmir on militants and their supporters after the deadly Pahalgam attack. Officials said on Saturday that “houses of terrorists were demolished, their hideouts were raided, and hundreds of people were detained for questioning.” The state administration in Jammu and Kashmir demolished at least 10 residential houses in six of the Kashmir Valley’s 10 districts, claiming that these belonged to local militants.

Apart from the demolitions, hundreds were detained in raids across the valley. Imtiyaza, a resident of Murran village of Pulwama district, 31 kilometres from Srinagar, described one of these demolitions. “We were told to take out the holy books and gold and asked to gather in the local mosque. Within minutes, two loud bangs were heard, and we realised the houses had been blasted.” Many neighbouring houses developed cracks.

Asmat Jan, asked why people suffer only because they live near a suspected militant’s house. “We live hand to mouth and struggled to build a small house, now damaged by blasts targeting a nearby home”, she lamented to The Quint. “The windows are shattered, and we have had to cover them with plastic.” Yasmeena, sister of Asif Sheikh, one of five suspected militants, said to journalists: “Even if my brother was involved in the Pahalgam attack, what has our family got to do with it? Why are our parents being punished for no fault of theirs?”

Marxist leader MY Tarigami declared rightly, “No one’s home can be destroyed without following legal procedures. The right to shelter is fundamental, and unlawful acts cannot be answered with unlawful responses. Terror must be countered through due process and the rule of law, not with similar acts of force.” Lawyer Vrinda Grover agreed: “If there is no active presence of terrorists, weapons, or any link to terrorism in a house, then demolitions carried out without due process are illegal” and violate explicit directions of the Supreme Court.

Bhojpuri folk singer and satirist Neha Singh Rathore was booked for sedition and damaging communal harmony for her posts that were critical of the union government on the Pahalgam attack. She alleged “security lapses and politicisation of terror attacks”. “Terrorist attacks are failures of the government, and those in power must be held accountable,” Rathore wrote. “Questioning the government should not be equated with disloyalty.” Sedition charges were filed against her for her social media posts about the Pahalgam killings.

Voices of conscience that opposed these forms of collective punishment were also punished. One of these is a Dr Madra Kakoti (known as “Dr Medusa” online) who teaches Hindi in Lucknow University and is a popular online satirist. She posted a video in which she affirmed that asking a person his religion before killing him is indeed a form of terrorism. But then, she declared, so also are other acts that target person for their religious identity such as mob lynching, job sackings, denying accommodation to certain communities, and targeted demolishing of homes. Protests broke out against her posts by students affiliated with the BJP’s student wing, and the police charged her with sedition, promoting enmity, hurting religious sentiments, disturbing public peace, and violating the Information Technology Act.

An anguished Srinagar MP Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi echoed Kakoti’s criticism. “If terrorism has a religion”, he said to The Quint, is the railway constable who killed three Muslims on a train in Rajasthan not a terrorist? Or those who participate in mob lynching. “We do not stereotype the entire Hindu population for the act of that mad guy in that train, for the act of those mad men who lynched Muslims. And we have many examples of that. And we do not stereotype Muslims for the acts of these animals (the terrorists)”.

The dagger of the Indian state also fell cruelly on Pakistani women married in Kashmir, and their children, following the Pahalgam attack. Most of these 60 women were married to former Kashmiri militants, and had lawfully entered Kashmir under the 2010 rehabilitation policy for former militants. They were bussed with their children to the Wagah border from districts Srinagar, Baramulla, Kupwara, Budgam, and Shopian and handed over to Pakistani authorities. Casually, families were torn apart.

One of these was 33-year-old Zahida Begum who lived in Gundpora, a border town of Bandipora district. She married former militant Bashir Ahmad Najar 15 years earlier. They built a small shed for a home, had three children and made ends meet with daily hard labour. But Zahida was content, and said her life in India was “sukoon bhari” – peaceful. “The army never frisked us, no one ever questioned us. I was living peacefully,” she said. Their two daughters Maryam and Aamina aspired to become IAS officers one day. But now faced with deportation she says she has nowhere to go. “Kill me”, she pleads. “Kill my children. Throw us across the border. But don’t separate me from my husband.”

And then India and Pakistan approached the brink of war. Missiles, drones, bombs and gunfire exploded on both sides of the border. The blood of civilians spilled, homes were destroyed, sirens blared, blackout drills played out and terrified school children were trained how they should save themselves if a full-scale war broke out.

Even more deafening than the bombardment was feverish hate and hyper-nationalism that screamed from television studios and heaved in social media accounts. Hate mongering through dangerously fake news broke out like a pandemic on both sides of the border.

But even before the drumbeats of war were silenced as suddenly as they ominously sounded, courageous calls for peace rang out on both sides of the border. TM Krishna, Carnatic music singer, equality activist and public intellectual declared on X “I am a pacifist. Don’t be afraid to say it”. Many were not afraid. Intellectuals, artistes, social workers, students and working people on both sides of the border demanded that their governments pull back from military aggression, and solve their disputes through dialogue.

Even before the two countries lurched so close to war, hate never had prevailed over the humanity of ordinary people. Amidst this gathering darkness of hateful retribution against innocents fuelled by the state and Hindutva organisations and trolls, lamps of compassion, solidarity and resistance continue to light up our bleak skies.

Punjab for instance became an oasis amidst the burning sands of north India for Kashmiri students. And remarkably it was religious organisations and not the government that took the lead in this. As news of attacks on Kashmiri students first emerged, it was the Kendri Sri Guru Sangh Seva in Chandigarh that first posted, on the night of April 24, a message to Kashmiri students who felt unsafe or needed help to come to the safety of their campus.

Other Sikh groups and institutions across the state emulated this example, and many such messages filled the social media. The Punjab police and state administration followed suit. Rakesh Shantidoot, a political commentator, described this as an “organic response” that refused to hold Kashmiris and Muslims guilty for the terror crime and instead expressed “complete solidarity” with those suffering persecution, influenced by the humanitarian teachings of the Sikh Gurus.

Mint reports that a mathematics teacher from a coaching institute was anguished to observe a couple of children harassing and outing other children, calling them terrorists after the Pahalgam terror attack. She spoke to her students about the need for unity and the injustice of blaming people only because of their identity. “After any terror attack – Pahalgam being the most recent – it becomes important for teachers like us to ensure that the outside hate doesn’t penetrate our classrooms,” the teacher observed on a social media post. “A Hindu child and a Muslim child should be able to study together in the same classroom without hating each other, despite what they hear in the news or at home. It’s our responsibility to ensure that children understand that just because the terrorists belonged to a particular religion and targeted tourists of another – their friends and their faiths aren’t to be blamed for this AT ALL. The dynamics of why some people target or kill others is complex – something that a 15-year-old doesn’t have the maturity to fully understand. A classroom is a sacred space, and there is ABSOLUTELY NO ROOM FOR HATE here of any sort.”

And in searing, proud, defiant rebellion, Farahdeen Khan, circulated a poem that captivated social media. The poem was titled I Am Not Your Apology. I quote a few lines:

Us.
The dusky-skinned, the mosque-born,
the ones with crescent moons in names,
whose mothers prayed in tongues too foreign for prime-time comfort.
Suddenly, we are all summoned.
Summoned to the dock of national conscience
to account for sins we neither conjured nor condoned…

I am Indian. Not as an addendum.
Not pencilled in the margin of someone else’s belonging.
But wholly, fiercely, undeniably so.
My veins carry the dust of Bhagat Singh,
the perspiration of Ambedkar,
the silence of every unmarked grave
that nationalism buried and forgot…

Do you not see?
The question is not whether we are Indian enough,
but whether this India remembers what that means.

So, hear me now —
I am Indian in every breath I take,
every grave I’ll return to,
every injustice I’ll fight till my bones are ash.
I will not lower my voice
so others may raise their fears.

I will not apologise for my name,
nor for the noise it makes in narrow throats.

This land is mine —
not because I say so,
but because it is written in the soil,
in sweat, in struggle,
in the quiet, unmoving certainty
of those who stayed
even when the nation turned its back.

I am grateful for research support from Omair Khan.

Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.

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