Mourning Becomes Power

INDIA SHALL OVERCOME THIS TOO, but the latest attack on it, a provocation by the same forces that see its existence as a rejection of their religious lie while being a stoic reminder of how cultural memory blends with modernity, clarifies again why we will never cease to be a target of their genocidal rage. We have seen them before, in varying degrees of horror, in the theatre of hate: as executioners in the corridors of a hotel in Mumbai, as the authors of 9/11 with their mentor spewing commandments of vengeance from Mount Jihad, as butchers in balaclavas hovering over their hooded victims in the sandy remoteness of the Levant, as killers invoking their God storming into the editorial meeting of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, as murderers and kidnappers in southern Israel on 7^th October 2023… We have seen them, holding the Book and the Kalashnikov with equal ease and devotion, hunting down the “impure” and the “faithless” in the pursuit of a divine alternative to the wretched lands of infidels. They are out there, to kill and to be killed for a higher cause, the Order of the One, as the foot soldiers of scriptural nihilism. They were there on the Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam, Kashmir, hiding in the pine forest, waiting for the moment to hurt an idea they have failed consistently to defeat.

That the massacre happened in a Kashmir steeped in the kind of complacency places scarred by a brutal past go through in the time of normalcy is no surprise. The New Kashmir, coming out of the prison of Article 370, which had allowed the Valley to turn the leverages of self-determination into a licence for anti-Indianness and an exaggerated sense of Kashmiriyat into a motivation for sub-nationalism, made the restrictions imposed on it by geography and history redundant—and reduced the distance between New Delhi and Srinagar significantly. The “Indianisation” of the Valley, as opposed to the “Islamisation” of the Valley, punctured the fantasy that claimed the ownership of Kashmir. They were biding their time to replace the will to dream with the submission to fear. And that Pahalgam happened in the wake of belligerence from the military establishment of Pakistan is no surprise either. The Kashmir that flowed through the veins of General Musharraf has entered the system of his successors, and its effects were there in the words of the current General, a true warmonger and a zealot whose incendiary invocations could have only inspired the jihad against India. Born in the untenable claim of Islam, Pakistan as a state has always put the civilian government as the weakest link in the triangular establishment of which the strongest are the military and the mullah. The latter two need each other, and the civilian in power remains dispensable. In an insufficiently imagined state, civil society has been stifled by the jackboot and the Book. The sagging morale of the failed state required an enemy that could mobilise hatred, and India was there. Kashmir is Pakistan’s desperation, sustained by terrorists robed or medalled. Kashmir is the nearest warfront; since 9/11, almost every terror story that convulsed the world has had a Pakistani ancestry. Jihadistan’s bloodlust is abetted by the Generals.

India has been living with such a sanguineous neighbour since Independence, making it perhaps the oldest victim state of Islamist terror, despite the high-profile status of Israel as a country on permanent alert, and whose very existence is seen as a lie by its enemies. Wars were fought in the name of Kashmir because Pakistan needs a cause, however unsustainable, to compensate for its sense of incompleteness, to feed the rage against history itself. And terrorists being the most pathetic attention seekers, Islamism’s mercenaries in Pahalgam wanted the lives of confirmed Hindu tourists to bring Kashmir as a dispute to the notice of the visiting American vice president and to the global headlines. Terror has not only reaffirmed its religious identity; it has revealed its political affiliation too. Pakistan, the safest haven for those who wage war against civilisations, provides spiritual sponsorship and logistical support to global jihad. Iran may be the patron saint of armed anti-Semitism, and its proxies could be opening multiple warfronts against Israel. Pakistan is the workshop of jihad. And as Pahalgam has revealed in chilling clarity, the jihadist aims the gun only at the infidel. Still, in radical Islam’s arc of hate, today’s India is a living defiance because, as a country and a cultural concept, it is a survivor not used to wallowing in defeatism. Securing the future is the only pledge a nation in mourning can take.

9/11 attacksCharlie HebdoIslamismjihadKashmirmourningPahalgamTerror attacks