Broken Consensus: Pahalgam and the Betrayal Within

The muted response of minority community leaders and the silence of India’s secular elite after the horrific massacre in Kashmir is both a tragedy and a betrayal.

Twenty-six more innocents lie dead in the meadows of Kashmir. Once again, India is asked to mourn. But the Pahalgam massacre of April 22 demands a stern reckoning and fierce introspection.

The chilling terror strike at Baisaran was carried out by ‘The Resistance Front’ (TRF) - a proxy of the banned Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), who opened indiscriminate fire on tourists after confirming they were Hindu. This is no sudden eruption of violence. It is the inevitable outcome of a long, slow rot: a national culture that refuses to name Islamist terror as the ideological force it is, and a political elite that has indulged, justified, and normalized sedition in the name of ‘progressive’ secularism.

It lies in the wilful silence of the Muslim community leadership in India, and of the secular intelligentsia that claims to represent national conscience.

While politicians in Kashmir across the spectrum have condemned it (and why wouldn’t they?), no prominent Islamic scholar, cleric, or leader has issued an explicit, unambiguous condemnation of the Pahalgam attack as an act of Islamist terrorism.

Instead, the public is served vague appeals for peace, with the inevitable warnings of ‘secular’ intellectuals against ‘communalising’ the issue. This moral evasiveness is not simply shameful but dangerous.

Because until India’s Muslim leaders confront the ideology that festers within parts of their community, until they stop pretending that Islamist terrorism is a ‘reaction’ rather than a pathology, the carnage will continue regardless of the abrogation of Article 370.

Terrorism is not created in a vacuum. It feeds on the enabling environment provided by intellectual cowardice, selective outrage, and political expediency. It thrives when universities glorify secession, when journalists sanitise jihadist violence as ‘resistance’ and when political parties, like the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) oscillate between condemning terror and appeasing its ideological architects.

Today, these very parties have called for a Kashmir bandh in mourning of the Pahalgam slain. But these are the very parties that, until recently, have spent decades appeasing separatists, normalizing Pakistan’s propaganda and treating the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits as a mere footnote in history. Their sudden tears ring hollow.

The challenge before India is therefore not merely military. It is moral. If Pahalgam is not to be repeated, India must demand, and not politely request, that its Muslim leaders condemn Islamist terrorism with clarity, consistency and courage. We have seen Muslim protest marches in states like West Bengal in solidarity with Rohingya refugees and against Israel’s strikes in Gaza. Where is that solidarity today with the slain Hindu tourists of Pahalgam?

Nowhere is this malaise clearer than in India’s universities, where slogans like ‘Azad Kashmir’ and ‘Free Palestine’ continue to be proudly emblazoned across walls and banners.

Besides JNU, Jadavpur University in Kolkata, one of India’s most celebrated institutions, is a prime instance of this where such slogans had landed the varsity in deep controversy recently. In 2016, posters had again appeared inside the campus openly supporting executed terrorists Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon. Guru was convicted for his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. Memon was hanged for helping orchestrate the 1993 Bombay bombings, which killed over 250 civilians. Even then, alongside the posters were hastily scrawled slogans: ‘Azad Kashmir,’ ‘Azad Nagaland,’ ‘Azad Manipur’ - a laundry list of demands for India’s Balkanisation, promoted by students who see treason not as shameful but fashionable.

Such displays are frequently defended by many faculty members, student leaders and a section of ‘progressive’ journalists as exercises in ‘freedom of expression.’ When nationalists protest these outrages, they are condemned as ‘intolerant’ and ‘fascist.’ When citizens demand accountability, they are told they are ‘stifling dissent.’

Thus, a generation of young Indians has been taught that sympathy for Islamist terrorists is not a betrayal of their country but a badge of enlightenment. The consequences of this cognitive dissonance are now being paid in blood - in Pahalgam, in Pulwama, in Uri, and before that, in Mumbai.

The NGO sector, manifested in outfits like the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) and the Popular Front of India (PFI), have either directly or tacitly supported separatist causes in the cloak of ‘human rights.’ Meanwhile, these same NGOs are conspicuously silent when the victims are Hindus massacred by Islamist terrorists.

India faces a stark choice. It can continue to cling to the Nehruvian delusion that makes secularism equivalent to appeasement, or keep saying that ‘nationalism’ is a dirty word, and that Islamist terror must be excused lest it offend minority sentiments. Or it can confront the truth that a poisonous ideology is festering within parts of its society, nurtured by false grievances, shielded by complicit elites and fed by an academia that treats treason as chic rebellion.

Pahalgam must be a turning point. Muslim community leaders must be made to condemn Islamist terror unequivocally, without qualifications, excuses or equivocations.

Universities must be reformed to stamp out the glorification of terrorists. Intellectuals who weep for Gaza but fall silent over Indian dead must be called out for their selective morality.

Pahalgam has conclusively demonstrated that the consensus that once bound India in the form of a belief in a shared future and a common destiny lies broken. If it is not rebuilt on the firm foundation of truth and courage, Pahalgam will not be the last massacre. It will only be the latest.