When two dozen tourists holidaying near Pahalgam in Kashmir’s mountains were confronted by ruthless killers with machine guns who rounded them up, demanded to know their religion (with some men’s pants even being pulled down to check if they were circumcised), and then were shot dead for being Hindu or Christian, we barely heard a word of sympathy or outrage about it.
Maybe because many of our news feeds just didn’t show it. Or worse we saw a sanitized version of it. Some Washington Post and Associated Press stories, for example, misled us with a simple twist of language. They described the deaths as the result of “indiscriminate firing,” shooting at everybody there, and not as the religiously–discriminatory massacre it was.
Religion is deeply relevant to understanding global events. But religious homogeneity is so normative. Our Core Cultural Diversity statement at USF reads, “Our students consider the world from a diversity of perspectives, graduating with the skills to think critically about how gender, race, class, and ethnicity shape our culture and values.” But the statement fails to mention religion.
The Pahalgam massacre forces us to confront this absence.
In Indian media, the victims are represented, and mourned. You know their names. Names like Sunil Nathaniel, whose wife Jennifer and children Akanksha and Austin, saw him shot dead on his knees and Somishetty Madhusudhan Rao, a young techie from my home-state Andhra Pradesh whose wife Kamakshi and two children, and two elderly parents, will now live without him.
26 victims. One local, and the rest, tourists. All civilians.
The single largest terrorist massacre since the 2008 LeT attack on Mumbai.
But in the miasma of misdirection that is American foreign news, there’s barely room for a twinge of pain. The reader’s attention is diverted to the supposed cause, a “rebellion” of “indigenous” Kashmiris against “Hindu Nationalist” Indian occupation.
They will rarely, if ever, admit that Hindu Kashmiris were indigenous too, and lived there until Islamist militants purged them out, almost all of them, starting with 140,000 in just one day in January 1990 after being told to “convert, flee, or die.”
Why does the U.S. media whitewash bloodbaths? Why do they pretend religious bigotry isn’t worth noting? These are not rhetorical questions to stoke “Oppression Olympics” or “trade in religious anxiety,” but critical ones to ask about the media.
The concept of framing is useful here. U.S. media frames the conflict in Kashmir as a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan going back to 1947, when British colonialism ended, and the two nations were partitioned.
But this is not the only frame.
A few days before the Pahalgam attack, Pakistan’s Chief of Staff General Munir gave a controversial speech asserting Pakistan’s cultural superiority. This speech reiterates historian Venkat Dhulipala’s thesis in his book “Creating a New Medina” that Pakistan was conceived by its founders with an ideal of global Islamic restoration.
But the problem does not lie with Pakistan alone. American imperialism from the time of the Cold War is also relevant. Some Pakistani officials have in fact blamed the West for using their country to do their “dirty work.”
All of this makes American universities especially important now.
Right after the massacre, Harvard hosted a conference platforming Pakistani government officials. Indian students expressed their shock, describing Harvard’s callous attitude as one of “Hinduphobia.”
“Hinduphobia” is the elephant in the room.
American universities have long avoided acknowledging it. A Harvard professor, in a 2023 New York Times Op-Ed, even gaslighted Hindu students who complain of Hinduphobia as “Modi-aligned factions.”
This racist, dog-whistle, ivory-tower dogma rests on the false claim that “Hinduphobia” is just an attempt by “Hindu Nationalists” to appropriate the term “Islamophobia.”
But the facts are verifiable. The word “Hinduphobia” was not borrowed from the post 9/11 campaign to fight “Islamophobia,” but was used as early as 1866 by a British anti-colonial writer to call out a notoriously prejudiced colonial historian.
The phenomenon it represents has a long history. As Kathryn Gin Lim writes in her book “Heathen,” we have to understand racism’s religious roots, and how racism still traffics in the trope of the “heathen.” And, sometimes, “anti-racist” voices too; just watch the recent Lady Gaga Goddess Kali “human-sacrifice” skit on Saturday Night Live. Nor can we keep diluting Hinduphobia as generic anti “South Asian” hate (as some reports on the recent online MAGA rampage against H-1B visa workers did).
We need to recognize at least now that Hinduphobia is inseparable from imperialism. Its cornerstones are the cultural tropes of the heathen, pagan, kaafir. It’s not just in the past at all.
But there is hope. Hindu college students, from Berkeley to Davis to Harvard, are standing up to say “indigeneity has no expiration date.” They see themselves, rightly, as inheritors of the longest anticolonial resistance in history- and allies in reviving indigenous traditions everywhere.
The university which has the intellect, moral clarity, and universal love, to name Hinduphobia will become the new beacon on the hill. Let us make USF that. Let truth be victorious. And let us honor the 26 people who died in Pahalgam.
Editor-in-Chief: Jordan Premmer, Chief Copy Editor: Sophia McCrackin, Managing Editor: Jordan DelFiugo, Opinion Editor: Dakota Duran, Scene Editor: Elina Graham
