Appeasement Nation

The blood has barely dried in the meadows of Pahalgam, where more than 25 tourists, mostly Hindus, were gunned down in cold blood. But India’s so-called ‘secular elite’ have already started a ritual of denial. No sooner had grieving widows and orphaned children begun recounting how men were segregated by religion and executed for being Hindu, than a deeply dishonest slogan flooded social media that “terrorism has no religion.”

The attackers did not think so. They demanded the recitation of the kalma before gunning the tourists down. They laughed while blowing out the brains of men in front of their children. This was no act of blind rage but a conscious, ideological act of Islamic terrorism. But say that out loud in India, and you will be called a ‘bigot’ disrupting the ‘composite fabric’ of the nation. Speak of jihad, and the usual cabal of academics, activists and progressive journalists crawl out of their echo chambers to accuse you of ‘Islamophobia.’

But Islamic terrorists across the globe are not shy. They do not claim to act in the name of no religion. They invoke the Quran, scream ‘Allahu Akbar’ before murdering innocents. They justify their actions as service to the ummah.

As the nation mourned Pahalgam, few in the Opposition unequivocally condemned the attack as an ‘Islamic terror strike.’ The most disgraceful reaction came from Robert Vadra, husband of Congress scion Priyanka Gandhi, when he suggested that the Pahalgam attackers struck because Muslims were being mistreated in India. Others like PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, whose party has long jostled with separatists, stopped short of blaming Pakistan.

Why this squeamishness? Because India has spent 75 years institutionalising Muslim appeasement. From the rewriting of history books to whitewashing atrocities of Islamic invaders, to the failure to properly integrate the Muslim community into the nation as citizens first and not as a perpetually aggrieved religious bloc, India has long walked on eggshells around its largest minority.

The Nehruvian consensus declared that Muslims could not be integrated as equal citizens unless pampered, protected and patronised. That philosophy gave us everything from Article 370 to the Shah Bano betrayal, to decades of soft-pedalling on jihadist violence. It has taught generations of Indians to internalize the idea that Islamic violence is somehow our fault.

This rot is evident in the civilian response to Pahalgam. It emboldens terrorists who know that India’s elite will twist itself into knots to avoid naming them. It demoralizes victims who see their pain erased in real time. It weakens national unity by forcing a dishonest narrative upon the people.

The attack in Pahalgam should have been a moment of reckoning. Instead, it has exposed the rotting moral timbers of our national conscience. Islamic terrorism is real. It has a name and a doctrine. Until India musters the courage to confront it without euphemism, it will remain vulnerable not just to bullets, but to a thousand cuts of cowardice.