Selective Conscience

Justice delayed is often described as justice denied. But for the Kashmiri Pandits, it has frequently been forgotten. The decision to charge separatist leader Yasin Malik as the alleged principal conspirator in the abduction, gang rape and murder of Kashmiri Hindu nurse Sarla Bhat comes after thirty-six long years. It is an indictment of the Indian state that allowed one of the most horrific crimes of the Kashmir insurgency to languish in legal limbo.

Sarla Bhat was only twenty-seven. According to investigators, she was abducted, subjected to unspeakable brutality and murdered in 1990 at the height of the Islamist terror campaign that drove hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits from their ancestral homeland. Her murder was part of a systematic and grim campaign of intimidation of Kashmir’s Hindu community. Besides living with grief, the survivors have had to endured the humiliation of watching those accused of orchestrating such crimes acquire political legitimacy, television platforms and, in some cases, respectful treatment by India’s political establishment in previous governments.

While the belated charge sheet is welcome, this delayed accountability compounds the original crime by signalling that some victims can be safely forgotten. More disturbing has been the selective morality that has surrounded Kashmir for decades. The moral clarity of India’s self-appointed liberal conscience, which has spoken with passion about custodial deaths and alleged abuses committed by the state, has mysteriously evaporated when the victims were Kashmiri Hindus.

Few exemplify this contradiction more starkly than Arundhati Roy, who helped confer moral legitimacy upon separatist figures like Malik. To share platforms with such men while scarcely acknowledging the victims of their terror was no an act of intellectual courage but a profound moral failure. A human-rights discourse that humanises perpetrators while neglecting their victims becomes a shameful exercise in ideological selectivity.

Roy has built an international reputation as an uncompromising defender of the oppressed and an eloquent critic of state violence. Yet, her public engagement with Yasin Malik, even as countless Kashmiri Pandit families waited for justice, reflected a troubling asymmetry.

This selectivity has inflicted lasting damage. It has convinced many Kashmiri Pandits that their pain occupies no meaningful place within India’s intellectual establishment. Their stories have rarely found space in literary festivals, university seminars or international human-rights campaigns. When they demanded recognition, they were often accused of communalising history or weaponizing victimhood by the very same left-liberal establishment which claims to be concerned about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

While the charge sheet against Yasin Malik offers a measure of hope, it cannot restore the lost decades or erase the message sent by institutional indifference. Sarla Bhat deserved justice in 1990, not in 2026. The greater scandal is that for thirty-six years, too many of the country’s loudest moral voices scarcely asked why she had to wait.