Pilgrims of a Lesser God

IN THE ISLAMIST hunting ground of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), Hindus have a target permanently painted on their backs. Civilised mores of secular morality and human empathy routinely bow to the will of Islamist obscurantism.

Nothing is sacrosanct.

And as dawn broke upon the sylvan mountains of Reasi, dozens of Hindu pilgrims realised this. A hail of bullets crashed into the outer shell of the bus piercing flesh, cracking bone and snapping artery. Shot through the chest, the bus driver fell dead. As his limp body slumped on the wheel, the bus careened 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 zealots, is yet another cruel reminder of the body politics of indifference, which is verging on complicity, to an unending genocide directed against Hindus in J&K.

Nothing has changed. And judging by the lack of outrage, nothing will. The murder in Reasi will soon be forgotten. Like January 19, 1990.

Almost three-and-a-half decades earlier, on that bitingly cold winter’s day, hate descended upon the Valley from the minarets of Islamist irredentism. The fugue, as it is wont to do, turned ordinary Muslims in Kashmir into legionnaires of the faith. Their orders were simple. Exterminate as many Hindus as possible as they are kafirs. Not a speck of impurity, warned their bloodthirsty indoctrinators, must remain to stain the pure ground of the caliphate that they intended to establish in the name of the one and truly merciful God.

For weeks after that fateful day, Hindus became the subject of ghoulish crimes. Those that escaped simply became invisible. The holocaust meant nothing. There was not even the pretence of acknowledging the inhuman crime, let alone assuring survivors that they had a shot at justice.

Lakhs of genocide survivors were bureaucratically processed. Labelled ‘migrants’, in a cruel whitewashing of their suffering, they were hustled into tented encampments where many still languish. They have been condemned to their fate for so long that even the Supreme Court dismissed their plea for a probe, decreeing that “too much time has elapsed.”

Immunity for the perpetrators has bred impunity.

And that’s why more and more Hindus die day after bloodstained day in J&K at the hands of emboldened radicals.

Make no mistake, Puran Krishan Bhat, Sunil Kumar Bhat, Sanjay Sharma, Raju Shah and the countless others who were condemned by a Pakistan-sponsored Islamist terror group to death in Reasi are the pilgrims of a lesser God.

Why else would the depravations they have had to endure fail to stir the conscience of civil society?

The solution, we are told, lies in democracy. But what is one to do when democracy itself becomes a conduit to elect the horsemen of an apocalyptic fanaticism?

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Indeed, where are the moderate Muslims of J&K? 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? Of 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, without fear, oblations at the altar of their holy of holies in J&K? 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 antecedents as Engineer Rashid? Who can forget that this baleful religious reactionary champions the cause of the Islamist state of J&K?

The ‘Islamist wave’ is upon us in India’s northernmost region. Sadly, history has taught us that there is no political silver bullet that can neutralise Islamist radicalism. Kemalists in Turkey, progressives in Iran, realists in Israel tried accommodation only to be consumed by the fervour of the beast. Multiculturalists in Europe will be next. It’s still not too late for India. Provided the nation’s leaders and commentariat end their collective denial over Reasi.

About The Author

Rahul Shivshankar

Rahul Shivshankar is Consulting Editor, Network 18

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