Dear Fatima,

I hear you.

I hear you on all that you wrote, just as I heard your decency, kindness, and timely courage when I saw your tweet last week amidst an avalanche of all kinds of messages glaring angrily from the phone screen. I remembered you, and our correspondence about Bollywood a few years ago with affection. It was nice to see a voice I knew from a place I was thinking only held great danger at that moment for a man I did not know but knew suddenly; a human being, a well-spoken man, a south Indian like me, suddenly trapped by a violent mob intent on lynching him.

When Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s face appeared on my screen that night in the middle of what seemed like an interrogation, the blood, the blindfold, I was immersed in great fear and sorrow.

Even worse perhaps than the fear and sorrow I felt when I read about the forty people blown to bits two weeks ago. This was after all a living, walking, talking person, still. For now. What would happen to him? After all, the only thing I knew of about how Pakistani forces seemed to treat their prisoners of war was how Captain Saurabh Kalia came back to his family in 1999 (“1976–1999” the Wiki thumbnail says, how small a human life, desecrated beyond belief, tortured, mutilated, murdered).

Wing Commander Abhinandan’s voice seemed calm, polite, professional. He appreciated the cup of tea. He said his Pakistani counterparts were professional. Yet, I had a deep sense of morbid fear at that image. What would be our responsibility in the days to come, all of us who are safely far from this pain and madness for now, merely spectating and commenting on our phones? If he did not come home, if he disappeared into some horror of pain, what use would all our words be, be they words of rage, outrage, or even sane counsel? Would even the most patient minds come down to bluster and bombast, and go “Nuke ’em all!” (ah, American pop culture, the world that gives the world its tools of speech so crisply now)?

But it was not that way. The Wing Commander has come home. A few hours after his return, I checked out some of the Indian news channels hoping to share in the sight of his smiling family members embracing him. I guess my American time-zone had already knocked me out of the moment there. Most TV news channels I saw had moved on apparently. A new Bollywood release! An interview with its stars had replaced what had seemed like urgent news just last week. Local politics. Gossip. News as usual. War is over!

The truth that you and I know perhaps is that the war is not really over. It’s just this particular outburst of sensationalism riding on this recent outpouring of pain that has perhaps subsided on the screens. Those who stand on distant borders fighting their battles with hands tied or unleashed are always in war. Those of us in homes far from these fighting fields are also, whether we know it or not, still in war too.

And that is what I want to try and share with you now, for the hatred that provoked this particular episode in conflict is not over at all, Fatima. I see it every day. And I see it not in the empty threats and rants of idle internet users or even irresponsible TV anchors, but in the institutionalized, militarized, and relentlessly normalized silence about the object of that hatred still.

I am, Fatima, your friend, fellow writer, and bit of a fan too. But what you should know is that I am in my wounded heart and colonized life situation also an “impure” (Napak), a “polytheist” (Shirk), and damn it, a “cow piss drinker” to thousands, perhaps millions of people — not just in Pakistan, but in India too.

I do not know if you recognize these words.

These words were not just the bombast of a pompous TV host who performs nationalism and war one day, and the colonizing eradication of the sacred traditions of the same people who he has had eating out of his hands the next. These words are not the words of an anonymous internet troll venting his frustration at strangers. And most importantly, these words are not words destined to fade away into electronic oblivion after a day or two of white-screen rage at that.

These words were followed up with consequence far more monstrous than all the war talk and obscene jingoism that offends us, or our sensibilities, rather.

These are the words that the JeM suicide bomber recorded as his manifesto and intent before he drove a car full of explosives into the CRPF convoy two weeks ago.

I grew up in Hyderabad. I suspect I do not have the same generic “fear of the other” that the “majority Hindus” of India are often told they have by experts. I grew up in intimate familiarity, friendship, and occasional tension, all of it too real, to dismiss anything with theoretical preconceptions and fashionable platitudes. I believe I know how to call out hate on the basis of evidence rather than imaginary preconception. And I believe there is a problem with hate for the Hindu in the world. Worse, unlike the war jingoism everyone can see and condemn, no one is talking about this hate against the Hindu, even when we see plainly that this is what we might call actionable hate. It’s the silence that seems deadlier than the twitter noise, quite frankly.

And worse, this hate seems to be getting fueled, normalized, celebrated even, by people who pretend to be your equivalent as liberal peace-loving South Asians on our side of the border.

Take the phrase “cow urine drinker.” In the past few years, this slur has become incredibly common among not just a few anonymous trolls, but the insult of choice for self-styled anti-war thought leaders like the Indian journalist Sagarika Ghose. Professors use it. Supposedly anti-racist, secular, inclusive leaders use it. If it was meant to address only a group of political activists accused of violence against Muslims in the cattle industry, but it has long escaped that intent and career. Like the word “Bhakth,” a beautiful word describing a love of the divine that has inspired some of the greatest fusion-sacred-music of the subcontinent which has been reduced to a generic insult, India’s media elite have run down the average Hindu sensibility so much that they do not even care anymore. (And speaking of media elites who don’t care, I might add that Bollywood, some of whose stars’ pro-military tweets you criticized, has had its share of making disgustingly disdainful anti-Hindu movies has it not? Today is the festival of the God who got chased around a toilet by Aamir Khan in PK, his idolator-hating fantasy masquerading as critique of religion in general).

Forty funerals around the country, and India’s media elite got busy working up a storm about being sent a “dxxk pic” on DM. Forty funerals around the country, and India’s media elite were phoning up the bereaved families to ask “what is your caste please?” so they can make up some bizarre Vietnam-era Mohammad Ali “No Yellow Man Called Me N……r” sort of false equivalence about India’s Hindu soldiers being lower caste fodder for upper caste nationalist vanity. Well, no yellow man might have called the black man N…..r, but the JeM man did call Hindus, all Hindus, all not like him, even the Dalit-Adivasi-Bahujans theoretically being victimized by upper caste nationalists like Modi (who is not upper caste by the way), “impure,” and he killed them.

And how many international news reports, op-eds, and commentaries have even mentioned this?

How many supposed anti-war voices that denounced TV nationalism as the greatest impulse towards military conflict today have found that other impulse in the culture, the sheer, naked, contemptuous hatred towards the Hindu, worthy of the slightest attention?

Does it not tell us something that the advocates of so-called “liberal patriotism” in New Delhi (I was going to say “India” but perhaps “New Delhi” is more accurate) don’t show a drop of remorse for having recklessly popularized a Hinduphobic slur that was actually uttered by a mass killer two weeks ago?

The moral crisis in journalism today is two-fold. Jingoism is only the more obvious one, a feeding circuit between a rising politics of what some call populism, and an increasingly disempowered people left feeling helpless, abandoned, and stomped over by an old colonial elite that ran the world as they saw fit for seventy years, and now being stood up to by their hero who killed 300 terrorists in one night. What is worse than jingoism, in my view, is the systematic silencing of the pain, the fear, and the enduring powerlessness of one group of people targeted for ultimate silencing institutionally, historically, and maybe inexorably. I do not recall seeing one news report in the New York Times talk about the anti-Hindu slurs used by the suicide bomber. I do not think one analysis piece arguing for seeing this as Kashmiri self-determination has acknowledged that there were Hindus in Kashmir too, who got mass murdered, threatened, and forcibly exiled from their ancestral homelands by their Muslim Kashmiri neighbors. The history of Kashmir did not begin in 1947, but not in the world of a news culture that serves geopolitical agendas rather than the truth.

It is not just what the media say that is of consequence, but also what they do not say. And what they have not said at all these last few days, is the fact that Hindus face bigotry, xenophobia, hatred, and extreme chauvinism too. It shows up in one form in the religious-nationalist ideology of a suicide bomber, and it permeates coldly in another in the discourses of international media and academia. And it is the latter that is even more some worrisome. The more that the captains of supposed liberalism and pacifism normalize the bigotry and militarism against one group of people through their silence and denial, the more that these values will remain discredited in the eyes of all who are vulnerable to the violence of such bigotry and militarism. And you have seen what systemic silencing and denial does even to a well-meaning chap like Trevor Noah. The Daily Show has become a shell of it’s once brave anti-war spirit with that silly display. Would Trevor have done his little dance if he knew what was happening was not a generic Twitter flare-up equivalent of a Wagah circus but the aftermath of a massive, hate-filled mass murder?

These last few days have been unpredictable and disorienting. People’s worldviews and realities are split down the middle, sometimes in the same country, neighborhood, or family. The world press has uniformly got behind one worldview that denies Hindu history, pain, and self-representation (speaking of systemic silencing, I might add that I am writing this on a blog because I know the Times which has rejected my writing several times in the past is unlikely to give me the courtesy that it gives you, and I don’t even bother asking now). In this worldview, it appears that peace has won.

Many in Pakistan (and in New Delhi), give credit to Prime Minister Imran Khan for that. I am indeed glad that under his leadership Wing Commander Abhinandan has returned, seemingly safely and with honor (notwithstanding some desperate propaganda video-making). I have no problem with his being given credit as a peacemaker now (I have his autograph from the time he played in a cricket match in Hyderabad in the late 1970s, and I recall half the Pakistani players in that hotel lobby seemed to have family in Hyderabad still, imprinting a sense that this “foe” was still intimately a “friend” too in my mind).

At the same time, I also do not discount the reading among many Indians that this peaceful gesture of abiding by international law on the humane treatment of a captured foreign soldier happened only because Prime Minister Narendra Modi happened to be in a position of strength, politically, diplomatically, and otherwise. I do not know. Let the politicians get their credits. I would like to ignore that for a moment and just applaud you, Fatima, writer to writer. It was utterly good of you to call for peace. I like to think it was your words that brought peace at this time. I pray that your words, and all of us who live for our words, will also bring truth in our time.

Vamsee