On April 22, 2025, 26 lives were lost in a barbaric terror attack that has left all of us broken, grieving, and, mourning. We as countrymen need to fight tourism united instead of involved in an inside war of sectional hatred.
That is not how justice will be served to our martyrs.
Allah says in Quran,
“…..Whosoever kills an innocent human being, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all mankind….”
Quran. 5:32
Terrorism has no place in Islam.
22nd April 2025- Black Day for Humanity
Baisaran Valley, the heavenly meadow located 7 km from Pahalgam town in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district, is the favorite destination of anyone visiting Kashmir. Surrounded by dense pine forests and resonating with the rhythmic echoes of the Lidder, the valley has something to offer to anyone. However, on 22nd April everything changed, forever, for everybody.
The world witnessed the deadliest-ever attack on tourists by five armed terrorists in which 26 civilians were killed and at least 17 were injured. The terrorists targeted Hindu tourists (though a Christian tourist and a local Muslim were also killed) and also emphasized ensuring that no women or children were killed. Only men were shot point-blank. The attack was unknowingly filmed by a tourist who was zip-lining while the hell broke loose. The Resistance Front (TRF) initially claimed responsibility for the attack and also released a statement saying that the attack was in opposition to the non-local settlement in the region and against the abrogation of the special status of Kashmir, effected on 5 August 2019. However, on 26 April, TRF retracted responsibility for the attack referring to the initial claim as a communication breach.
The motive of terrorists and the extent to which it was fulfilled
On 7 May 2025, the foreign secretary of India Vikram Misri stated that the objective of the attack was to negatively impact the economy by attacking tourism in the valley. However, it is important to understand the wider implications- of breaching the Unity in Diversity that once defined this side of the border and is already threatened. I couldn’t be more remorseful than I am while admitting that this evil motive of dividing the masses in the name of religion was successfully met. And, since we are anytime more concerned about what our next-door neighbor believes in and how he lives life, fall into the trap without even realizing it. Following are a few of the many incidences that have questioned the very foundation of India- Secularism!
- A 7-month Pregnant Bengal Woman denied treatment for being Muslim.
A complaint was lodged at the Maheshtala Police Station and West Bengal Medical Council on Thursday against a gynecologist for refusing to treat a seven-month pregnant woman allegedly for her being a Muslim, post-Pahalgam attack. The doctor complained on Friday, claiming defamation and denying commenting on religion. According to the complaint, the doctor, who has been treating the woman for seven months, knew her by her first name—Konkona. On seeing her surname—Khatun —the doctor allegedly said she would not treat a Muslim patient, referred to attacks, and made allegations of religious bigotry. However, the doctor stated in her complaint it was the patient's attempt at ruining her three-decade-old career due to personal reasons. The complaint's sister-in-law Mehfuza Khatun, a lawyer, said they would move to court if cops or the council didn’t act. - Kashmiri Shawl Sellers attacked in Uttarakhand.
At least 16 shawl sellers from Kashmir have left Mussoorie after two vendors were allegedly attacked by locals on April 23. One of the vendors who was assaulted, Shabir Ahmed Dar from Kupwara, was reported saying that he had been visiting Mussoorie for 18 years to sell his goods. He added that the attackers were from the area and had seen them before. “No one stood up for us,” quoted Dar. He added that the police had told them there were threats leveled against Kashmiris after the Pahalgam terror attack and that it was better for them to leave. - Mentally challenged Muslim Man lynched in Mangaluru.
A man was lynched after he allegedly shouted pro-Pakistan slogans during a cricket match in Karnataka’s Mangaluru district. The man, identified as Ashraf, 36, hailed from Parappur in Kerala’s Malappuram district. His family stated to the police that he had an intellectual disability. The incident came to light after the police were told about an unidentified body found near a temple on the outskirts of Mangaluru. A preliminary autopsy report revealed that the man died of internal bleeding due to blunt force and in the absence of timely medical aid. - 15 year old assaulted and forced to urinate on Pakistan flag in Aligarh
A 15-year-old Muslim student in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh was allegedly assaulted and forced to urinate on a Pakistan flag by a group after he picked up the flag that had been kept on the road during a protest against the Pahalgam terror attack. The boy picked up the flag from the middle of the road when he was on his way from school. The protesters asked him to put the flag back and forced him to urinate on the flag. - Kashmiri students face threats, intimidation, isolation.
Areeba, a 22-year-old student from Kashmir who lives in Chandigarh, recounted how her friend, also from Kashmir, was traveling to the airport on Thursday morning when strangers stopped her and pulled her out of her cab, causing a bruise. They shouted she said, “You Kashmiris are the ones responsible for attacks like the one in Pahalgam, you support them.” Since then, Areeba, a radiology student at Rayat Bahra University, has locked herself in her rented room, fearing the same backlash.
In Uttarakhand, members of the Hindu Raksha Dal, a vigilante group, threatened Kashmiri Muslim students in Dehradun, demanding they leave the state “or face consequences”. Suvendu Adhikari, head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengal, tweeted the address of two supposed Kashmiris, wrongly accusing them of suspicious activity. “After Pulwama in 2019, I remember hiding in my room for a week,” said Junaid Bhat, a student at the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in Punjab. “Now it is happening again. We are either invisible or accused. There is no in-between.
”Rukhsar Wani, a nursing student at Rahat Baharat University in Chandigarh, cried while describing the harassment she faced at a local market on 24 April. “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,” she said. “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?’” she said.
The cost of fuelling Religious Hatred- The lives of our daughters from Himanshi Narwal to Gurmehar Kaur to Bilkees Bano
- Following the tragic death of Lt. Vinay Narwal in the attack, his wife Himanshi Narwal faced immense online harassment for urging people not to target Muslims and Kashmiris. The National Commission for Women (NCW) voiced support for Himanshi and emphasized that targeting a woman for her personal views and choices is inappropriate. The Commission stated on X, “After the death of Lt. Vinay Narwal, the way his wife Himanshi Narwal is being criticized on social media about one of her statements is unfortunate”.
- The daughter of Captain Mandeep Singh- Company Commander of the 4 Rashtriya Rifles unit who was martyred during an encounter to neutralize a group of terrorists who had attacked the company at Chak Nutnus village in Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara in 1999, Gurmehar Kaur, was attacked and hounded after a social media post in which she batted for peace between India and Pakistan. She was threatened with rape after her post, in which she had said "Pakistan did not kill my father. War did", went viral.
- Bilkis Bano, who was brutally gang raped during the communal violence that followed the Godhra train-burning incident, still watches the perpetrators shift from one jail to another. She was 21 years old at the time, and five months pregnant. Seven members of her family were killed by rioters. Victim of unimaginable horror, she still awaits justice.
Shouldn’t these heinous incidents be accounted for just for the magnitude of the crime and the perpetrators be punished just for violating the modesty of fellow beings without any commentary on religion, race, or, belief?
What defines Terrorism and does it have a religion?
Terrorist insurgencies, in all their configurations and local conflicts, constitute the primary warfare threat facing the international community today. As a result, terrorism courses, research institutes, and certificate programs have been proliferating at universities and other academic institutions around the world. Despite the great attention being devoted to terrorism studies; however, there is no consensus about the most fundamental starting point in terrorism studies: how to define terrorism. Defining terrorism is the most ambiguous component in terrorism studies, with no universally accepted definition that differentiates attacks against civilian non-combatants or armed military or takes into account the latest trends in terrorist objectives and warfare.
In 1983, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) formulated one of the most widely used definitions of terrorism. According to this definition, terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” As part of this definition, the term "non-combatant" includes civilians and military personnel who are unarmed or not on duty. The term ‘international terrorism’ refers to terrorism “involving citizens or the territory of more than one country,” while the term ‘terrorist group’ refers to “any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.” The DOS’s definition is operationally useful for legal reasons because it provides a legal basis to arrest and indict the perpetrators of such acts.
With the rise in global terror, the world has witnessed a steep rise in a psycho-social and political phenomenon- Islamophobia. So much so that even the novelists, filmmakers, producers, and photographers have lost their sense of justice and balance. It is no big deal nowadays to stereotype Muslims in every sphere of life. The most common appearance of terrorists composes men with particular dress and a particular style, one that easily depicts Muslims. But what should be the basic question? Crimes should be considered crimes and criminals must be executed with a single identity based on the type and magnitude of the crime with no relation to which faith the person believes in or which region the person belongs to. This may seem pointless initially, but this is how we as humans can combat the limitless spread of hate, something that holds us back from releasing ourselves from the clutches of communalism and extremism.
Unmasking the Impact of Religious Stereotyping
India is officially a secular state with a dominant 80% of Hindus in a massive population of one billion. However, Muslims and Christians count up to 220 million and 30 million respectively. This is something that has defined the democratic and secular ideals on which the country is entirely based, on paper at least. For the last decade or so the secular democratic state has been converging with Hindu Nationalism, incorporating an extremist approach to society and order. The erosion of secular values is evident through the boundless increase in sectional hatred, further reinforced by discriminatory laws and policies. The vulnerabilities are not only a challenge to Muslims and Christians but also despise other minorities including Sikhs, Buddhists, and those from Scheduled Castes. In summary, everybody other than a Hindu is vulnerable to being labeled as a perpetrator of crime.
In such a scenario where we are busy making people fearful for their beliefs and identity when the nation is hit by the collective grief of losing 26 civilians to barbarism, we fail to reach out to the real perpetrators, let alone penalize them.
The Media Mirage- A frantic and irresponsible race for TRPs
“Cringe-worthy, irresponsible coverage of war from the Indian media, especially TV media. It's humiliating to call myself a journalist in this country. Forget your ethics, which you never followed anyway. The way the Indian media delivers fake news is a full-blown psychological assault.” -
Kamala Thiagarajan;
Journalist. Winner of the 2025 June L Biedler prize for cancer journalism, Pulitzer Center grantee 2023. Bylines in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, NPR & more.
After an attack as heinous as the Pahalgam Attack and the testing times that have followed since the only thing we must ask for is accountability. However, Indian Media has starkly failed to deliver this. What it delivered is nothing more than the excessive decibels of hatred against Muslims. The media, instead of focussing on the Hindu-Muslim angle, should have asked how such an act could be carried out by militants without intelligence agencies detecting their footprints – electronic or otherwise. Another question that the media should have asked is how and why there was no security – not even police – at a popular tourist place that was witnessing a gathering of a large number of tourists daily. The media was repeatedly showing videos allegedly of the kin of the victims claiming that Hindus were targeted. While this aspect also needed to be exposed with due responsibility, one doesn’t know whether these videos were put on air after due verification or not. While the narrative of Hindus being targeted was being magnified, the mainstream media studiously avoided showing assertions by tourists about the help extended by locals in evacuating many panicked tourists to safe places. Reassuring news including the unanimous passing of a resolution by the J&K Assembly condemning the terrorist attack, and, the joining of hundreds of worshippers on Friday prayers at Jama Masjid Srinagar, with the chief cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq to observe one-minute silence in solidarity with the families of the victims, didn’t find any place in the Indian news channels. Moreover, Syed Adil Hussain Shah, a local pony operator and the sole breadwinner of the family (more importantly for many, a Muslim and a Kashmiri!), who sacrificed his life in a brave attempt to disarm terrorists and save tourists, was not even mentioned in the news. Clearly because doing this would not add fuel to hatred.
In my opinion, the media is to be squarely blamed for the sorry state of affairs and the divide we are living through. These are sadly the forces contributing to destabilising the nation’s secular polity and creating communal discord.
More importantly, what we need to do is ask ourselves. The blasting decibels and the made up stories aren’t and shouldn’t be exciting for anybody. When we follow such news, the makers indulge more in the dirty work and the cost comes at someone being lynched somewhere, someone being denied medical treatment somewhere, and, of course the citizens being unaware and misinformed.
How the nation should have behaved instead.
According to the Ministry of Finance, GOI, the Personal Income Tax Rate in India stands at 39%. Personal Income Tax Rate in India averaged 34.89% from 2004 until 2025, reaching an all-time high of 42.74 percent in the year 2020. Moreover, India's defense spending remains significant, ranking as the fifth-largest in the world. The 2025 budget allocation of Rs. 681210 crores (USD 77.4 bn) marks a 9.5% increase from the previous year, with an emphasis on modernizing the armed forces and enhancing Indigenous defense production. Since we are shown such lustrous headlines by the government, we as citizens should have demanded an answer to the following questions instead of asking about the religion of the victims.
- When we are, (rightly so), spending these many resources on the defense of our nation, why aren’t we safeguarded from such attacks?
- When an average Indian is directed to pay an average of 39% taxes citing the vision of development and safety, where is the money being spent and if it is actually being spent?
- Doesn’t this point to the weakness and failure of the government?
- If a Pahalgam Attack follows a Pulwama Attack, 7 years apart, wasn’t the abrogation of Article 370 an over-politicized issue aimed at using public sentiment to win the 2024 elections?
During the all-party meeting in New Delhi on 24th April, Home Minister Amit Shah reportedly is believed to have informed opposition MPs that Baisaran – reachable only by foot or horseback – was opened by local tour operators on April 20, more than two months earlier than usual, and that this “decision” was made without notifying or securing clearance from Union security agencies. However, this claim is already considered a farce as the spot remains open year-round, with over 1,000 tourists visiting daily, since 2020. Despite the known fact that more than 1000 tourists visit the spot daily, no security personnel were deployed or present when the gunmen struck. This exposes serious callousness on behalf of the administration. Even after the attack, response times were very slow. A Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) team took over an hour to reach the scene, after being alerted by the local police control room, which received the first distress call from a woman at around 2:45 pm. By the time they arrived, the assailants had already fled. Twenty-six victims lay dead, some of whom might have survived had they been timely transported to a nearby hospital. Security in Pahalgam is typically divided into three concentric layers: the outer perimeter is monitored by the Indian Army’s 3rd Rashtriya Rifles battalion, tasked with overseeing infiltration routes and high-altitude surveillance; the middle layer is managed by the CRPF’s 116th battalion, responsible for securing roads and conducting area domination; and the inner core is handled by the Jammu & Kashmir Police, who gather local intelligence and maintain law and order. On April 22, all three layers failed simultaneously! Even more unbelievable was that there were no drones, surveillance cameras, or alert systems in place at Baisaran, despite its status as a popular tourist site. There was also no evacuation or medical response mechanism. Injured victims were carried on foot by fellow tourists and pony handlers.
Quoting Sheena Dwivedi, wife of Shubham Dwivedi who was killed at Pahalgam- “nobody came to our rescue and we were left like orphans, in the valley.” The incident, along with many others, shall mar the history of India just because of negligence and failure of authorities, who ironically claim to be the only doers of affairs. None of this caught the attention of anyone as we were busy lynching and blaming people for their identity and beliefs!
A lesson that our Martyrs taught us.
The 26 respected and honorable men who were killed on 22nd April wouldn’t want any other family destroyed. They wouldn’t want pregnant women being denied treatment, or the houses of people living in Border areas being blown up in pieces. They would want justice and justice is eliminating the responsible people, and not innocents. While Operation Sindoor connects and resonates with each one of us, we need to see that we are not fooled like every other time and that our questions are not silenced or dodged. All 26 civilians symbolize humanity and bravery, and shall never be forgotten. All of them deserve every form of respect and homage. The government must honor them with highly deserved Martyr status. After all, the tyrant’s rule dies with his death, but a martyr’s rule begins with his death. Last but not least, our martyrs would never want us divided as we are currently. We must unite and fight against terrorism- our common enemy, with a united fist.
Bibliography
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/doctor-refused-treatment-because-of-my-religion-woman/articleshow/120627870.cms
- https://amp.scroll.in/latest/1081835/after-pahalgam-terror-attack-anti-muslim-violence-reported-in-four-states
- https://article-14.com/post/-what-did-i-do-after-pahalgam-attack-kashmiri-students-in-at-least-4-northern-states-face-intimidation-threats-isolation--680b16d1a8d53
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/26298341?seq=1
- https://thewire.in/media/communalisation-pahalgam-reinforcing-anti-muslim-sentiment
- https://thewire.in/security/pahalgam-attack-exposes-deep-faultlines-indian-security-apparatus