When Truth Becomes Survival: The Kashmiri Hindu Experience
The genocide of a community subjected to historical persecution for its faith and identity is not an event that can be glossed over. It is a terrible tragedy — a wound on humanity itself. In such circumstances, speaking truth becomes an essential instrument of survival. Naming the guilty, exposing the structures that enabled the genocide, and rejecting all new models that obscure the genuine path to redress are vital acts of resistance and healing for the victimised community.
One does not need to belong to a particular organisation to speak truth to power or to society at large. All that is required are three indispensable qualities:
1. Integrity
2. Clarity
3. Courage
India’s historical undoing lies in its retention of colonial-era structures even after the formal transfer of power in 1947. This was compounded by the country’s acceptance of what, in political parlance, came to be known as Nehruvian Secularism. To label this project as genuine secularism is to distort the very meaning of the term if secularism is understood as intercommunal harmony. Nehruvian Secularism was never that. It was a political construct designed to repackage the logic of the two-nation theory by accommodating Muslim communalism in a new form.
Nehru’s stances on vital issues — Kashmir, Aligarh Muslim University, retention of Muslim personal law, the definition of communalism, his ambivalence toward Indic civilisation, hesitation during the Hyderabad intervention, or legitimisation of the Muslim League — consistently reflected this political bias. The result was devastating: Nehruvian Secularism weakened every institution it touched, leaving the Hindu community as its principal casualty.
When the Hindu community of Kashmir faced genocidal cleansing in 1990, the first response of the political establishment — steeped in Nehruvian Secularism —was denial. Media outlets were instructed to suppress coverage. When that strategy failed, new narratives emerged: false claims that Kashmiri Pandits had monopolised power or lived privileged lives. Even Goebbels might have mocked such propaganda. When that too collapsed, the entire genocide was conveniently attributed to Pakistan alone, absolving local collaborators at various levels. Some political factions further diluted the truth by ascribing jihadist terrorism in Kashmir to economic grievances rather than the fusion of perverted regressive anti-civilisation jihadist ideology and militarisation.
These denials crippled both the redressal of the Kashmiri Hindu genocide and India’s national interests. What began as cross-border terrorism mutated into an Indo-Pakistan territorial dispute. This reframing provided the Anglo-American bloc an opportunity to manipulate India’s strategic position and restrict its regional ascent.
Though the later NDA governments made some departures from this legacy, they too have hesitated to confront the issue head-on. Cultural interventions such as The Kashmir Files and Baramulla have begun to reframe the narrative, bringing the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus into deserved national focus.
Some time ago, a senior journalist — steeped in the Nehruvian worldview — met me. Despite our ideological differences, he listened carefully as I recounted incidents demonstrating the complicity of sections of Kashmiri society in both 1947 and 1990.
That conversation reaffirmed for me the vital importance of telling and retelling the stories of genocide. Documented truth sensitizes public opinion, which in turn is indispensable to halting ongoing attrition and achieving durable rehabilitation. When public opinion internalizes this truth, it possesses the power to overturn complacent or hostile state policies.
The Pandit community may be small in number, but its cause is not marginal. Politicians may overlook it in vote-bank calculations, yet when genocide redressal becomes a mainstream moral issue, it can no longer be ignored — it becomes central to political legitimacy.
Therefore, every conscientious individual in my community must commit to speaking truth — unalloyed and unflinching — to multiple audiences:
1. Truth to those responsible for the genocide.
2. Truth to those in power who possess the means to ensure redress.
3. Truth to fellow citizens whose collective conscience shapes governmental action.
4. Truth even to sections within our own community who, in pursuit of social validation or personal advancement, undermine the struggle by denying or diminishing the genocide.
The strength of works like The Kashmir Files or Baramulla does not lie in nostalgia for lost landscapes — the flowing rivers, orchards, or snow-capped peaks — but in their courage to name and confront genocide.
We must all learn to speak truth — and recognise the transformative power of doing so.
[The writer has authored “Pakistani Invasion on J&K (1947-48): “Untold Stories of Minorities”, published in 2024.]
