(Pic via Scroll)

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If you’re a journalist who has covered India’s human rights abuses in Kashmir, then you can attest to the level of ferocity in which Hindu nationalist trolls swarm your social media accounts. In August I received hundreds of death threats, alongside those who promised to rape my wife and daughter after publishing back-to-back articles criticizing New Delhi’s revocation of Article 370,which I wrote about recently for TRT World.

Essentially, these trolls operate as India’s online lynch mob, and when they aren’t threatening to harm you and family members, they’re plastering your replies with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda meant to divert global attention away from the fact that the Indian military has raped, tortured, murdered, and forcibly disappeared tens of thousands of Muslims in Kashmir in the past three decades alone.

At the center of their effort to silence Kashmiri voices, whitewash India’s crimes and garner global sympathy for the Modi government’s repressive moves in the valley is the claim Muslims carried out genocide against the territory’s Hindu minority, the Kashmiri Pandits, in 1989.

Their tweets typically include claims that “tens of thousands” of Kashmiri Pandits were killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced during the period spanning September 1989 to May 1990, claims that are again being reinforced in the mainstream media by India’s ruling party (BJP) and the country’s shadow government, otherwise known as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in the wake of Article 370’s abrogation.

The problem with this claim is it’s entirely untrue, misrepresents one of the most tumultuous periods in Kashmir’s history, and does nothing but weaponize, instrumentalize, and exploit the legitimate suffering and grievances of the Kashmiri Pandits.

In short, Kashmir’s Muslims did not carry out genocide against the Hindu minority.

All in all, a sum total of 219 Kashmiri Pandits were killed during a 15 year period spanning 1989 to 2004, according to an investigation carried out by the Indian government’s Ministry of Home Affairs in 2005.

Without intending to minimize this violence or Pandit suffering, it’s worth noting that tens of thousands of Muslims were killed or disappeared by Indian security forces during this same period.

If genocide has taken place in the disputed valley, then it’s the decades long slaughter of Kashmiri Muslims at the hands of radicalized Hindu Indian soldiers.

Moreover, violence against Kashmiri Pandits in 1989–90 took place within the context of a sustained rebellion against Indian rule in Kashmir, with Islamic militants selectively assassinating spies and Indian military collaborators. During a six month period, more than 100 such killings were carried out, culminating with the assassination of BJP’s president in J&K.

These targeted politically motivated killings not only paralyzed the Indian controlled government in the valley, but spread a wave of fear throughout the Kashmir Pandit community. This fear sparked a mass exodus.

It should also be noted that Muslims who were perceived to be beneficiaries or patrons of the Indian government and military were also targeted by militants, which emphasizes the political motives of this violence, and thus undermining New Delhi’s effort to locate it within a religious context.

Moreover, communal violence had never been a feature of the relationship between the two religious communities, with the territory’s Muslims and Hindus living side-by-side without anxiety for centuries.

“Instead of treating Kashmir as a political matter, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies have turned it primarily into a communal and economic one. They have stoked Kashmiri Pandits’s felt experience of injustice by pitting Pandit and Muslim suffering against each other,” observes Nishita Trisal, a Kashmiri Pandit and doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Ultimately, the myth of a Kashmiri Pandit genocide is deployed by India as a propaganda device to conceal the fact that Indian Occupation Forces have put more than 10,000 Kashmiri Muslims in unmarked graves since 1989 as part of its effort to crush Kashmiri liberation aspirations.

If you’re looking for evidence of genocide in Kashmir, then it’s right there before your very eyes, carried out by India’s Hindu extremist government against Kashmir’s eight million Muslims.

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