In the Islamist hunting ground of Jammu and Kashmir, Hindus have a target permanently painted on their backs. In fact, the hallowed laws of secular morality and human empathy routinely bend to the will of Islamist bigotry. Nothing is sacrosanct. And as dawn broke, dozens of Hindu pilgrims realised this. A hail of bullets ripped through the sides of a bus, piercing flesh, cracking bones and snapping arteries. Shot through the chest, the bus driver fell dead. As his limp body slumped on the wheel, the bus careered off the road into the gaping jaws of awaiting death.
Several are dead, several wounded. The limp lifeless form of a toddler, a virtual sacrificial offering to satanic zealots, is a cruel reminder of the indifference that is complicit in an unending genocide.
Indeed, nothing has changed.
Almost three and a half decades earlier, in 1990, on a cold winter day, hate announced itself from the minarets of Islamist irredentism. The miasma snuffed out Hindu lives. For the legionnaires of the faith, Hindus were reviled Kafirs that had to be exterminated. Not a speck of impurity – warned the bloodthirsty mullahs – must stain the pure ground of the caliphate that was to be established in the name of the one and truly merciful God.
Hindus became the subject of ghoulish crimes. Those who escaped simply became invisible. The holocaust meant nothing. There’s not even a pretence of acknowledging the inhuman crime, let alone the hope of justice. The lakhs of genocide survivors have been bureaucratically processed by the state as migrants.
Immunity for the perpetrators has bred impunity. And that’s why more and more Hindus die, day after bloodstained day, in Jammu & Kashmir, at the hands of emboldened radicals.
Make no mistake, the several who were condemned by a Pakistan-sponsored Islamist terror group to near-certain death in Reasi are the pilgrims of a lesser God. Why else would the dastardly depravations they have had to endure fail to stir the conscience of civil society?
Where are the moderate Muslims of Jammu & Kashmir? Don’t they realise that their couch-bound protestations have become so formulaic that they give off the whiff of criminal apathy? And what of that clique of committed secularists who lit a candle for Rafah’s dispossessed? To them, we ask, don’t the Hindus of India have a right to return? Don’t they have an equal right to life?
And the omnipresent state? When will it safeguard the lives of Hindus so they too can offer oblations at the altar of their holy of holies in Jammu & Kashmir? The promise of a secular state.
The solution, we are constantly told, lies in evolving a political solution grounded in the certitude of democracy. But what is one to do when democracy itself becomes a conduit to elect the horsemen of an apocalyptic religious fanaticism? What is one to do when civil society democratically votes en bloc in record hordes to elect a man of such blighted antecedents as engineer Rashid? Who can forget that this baleful figure publicly championed the cause of the Islamist state of Jammu & Kashmir.
When, we demand to know, will the nation’s gaze fall on Reasi?
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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