In the Baisaran Valley of Indian occupied Kashmir, 26 Indian tourists were killed by 5 armed terrorists in Pahalgam on the 22nd of April. Amongst them was a local Kashmiri who had tried to wrestle a gun from one of the militants in an attempt to stop these attacks.
Let’s be honest! What lies at the foundation of the Pahalgam attack is a significant security failure. One might ask: how did this unfold inside the world’s most militarised zones? The Modi government, after revoking Article 370 (which granted minimal autonomous status to the region and its people), further deployed 50,000 military and paramilitary personnel—adding to the already stationed 700,000. How did this occur inside a region that is supposedly under the firm grip of India and its surveillance technology?
Reports from the Indian media suggested the assailants were active for an extended period, and questioned their victims about their religious affiliations before executing them. If these reports are true, then this means that the attackers were not only well-organised but had ample time to execute this without any interruption. And this happened when the army camp was just three kilometres away, in a region so heavily militarised that one cannot cross even the market area without going through a number of scrutiny checks.
And where were the drones?
India, rather than questioning their own fault lines, was quick to blame Pakistan without any verification or proof. These allegations that held zero credibility were followed by misdirected aggression. Mainstream Indian media houses, now effectively an extension of the Modi government and the Hindutva, flamed the fires of anti-Pakistan/anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Soon after, Prime Minister Narender Modi gave a speech in Bihar and called the Pahalgam attack an assault on the soul of India, promising the entire nation unimaginable punishment for not only the attackers but also the ones who supported them. This declaration made the audience chant “Modi Modi”, and on the 6th of May, the government launched Operation Sindoor.
Operation Sindoor
The image of Himanshi Narwal sitting next to her husband’s body in Pahalgam was called stoic. This photograph was insensitively transformed into a Studio Ghibli version and became a viral symbol of carnage as well as a catalyst for war. The image of a young woman who was married to a Naval officer, widowed on their honeymoon by ‘Muslims’ in Indian-Occupied Kashmir, was circulating all over social media. Deployed quite strategically in order to stir nationalistic fervour and garner support for revengeful military action. More importantly, the image, laden with interpretations, became a signifier of what it represents and what it ought to represent for the people of India.
Sindoor or Sindura is a vermilion red powder traditionally worn on the middle hair parting by Hindu women as a marker of their marital status. In Hindu marriage rituals, applying Sindoor is to wish for your husband’s longevity and is a vow to protect his well-being. When a woman becomes a widow, she is no longer allowed to wear the Sindoor. The Pahalgam attack, therefore, was depicted as an attack on the Sindoor.
This imagery became the inspiration for the military retaliation against Pakistan. A ‘homage’ for the women who were widowed because of the terror attack. A mission and responsibility taken by the Indian government to restore a woman’s honour. Operation Sindoor, when looked from a patriarchal context, demonstrates larger implications. This pro-war sentiment links the honour of the nation-state to the women of the country. Implying that a woman’s marital status is the only defining aspect of her life, reducing her individuality to the socially assigned role of a wife.
Merging gendered religious symbols with militaristic aspirations means forging an emotional connection with the lives of Hindu women and the Indian military’s objectives. This, in turn, becomes an extension of the cultural significance of this red vermillion inside Indian consciousness.
India has already lived through a painful history during 1947, where women’s bodies were turned into tools of conflict, used as symbols of revenge, honour, and shame. Operation Sindoor is a disturbing repetition of that same legacy. Once again, this pursuit of further bloodshed is weaponised by women’s grief and their familial bonds. The renewed violence in the form of airstrikes brought no real relief to the women mourning their husbands; instead, it only exacerbated their grief. In addition, it created new wounds on women who live across the border, who found themselves or their family members among the civilian casualties caused by Indian airstrikes. When the state uses women’s suffering as a battle cry, it betrays them, erasing their voice and stripping away their rights as citizens as well as their humanity.
A good example of silencing women’s voices during wartime is when Himanshi Narwal, during an interview, made a plea for peace, expressing her desire that no hate should be directed towards Kashmiris or Muslims. As a consequence of her publicly stated anti-war stance, Narwal was not only brutally trolled but received rape threats on social media by chest thumping pro war Hindutva fanatics.
In a subsequent interview, Narwal changed her stance and thanked the government for Operation Sindoor, where she said, “I am thankful to the government and this should be the start to the end of terrorism…. I request the government that they should not stop here and they should make sure that every person who wants to attack peace, who wants to create terror, who wants to spread hatred should be erased”.
American political theorist Cynthia Enloe rightly asserts that “women’s wars are not men’s wars”. This statement underscores an important distinction in which women experience war and conflict, how their stories are mostly overshadowed and misused. During a public lecture organised by the University of Westminster titled “How Can You Tell If You Are Becoming Militarised?” Enloe discussed how military assumptions and values infiltrate everyday life and ordinary spaces. In particular, she emphasised the power of visual imagery, cautioning against the use of unthought images and how they can reinforce harmful narratives.
Enloe challenged the mainstream media that capitalise on reductive portrayals of women in conflict. Be it the viral images of the widows in the Pahalgam attack or the half widows of Kashmiri women—what becomes undoubtedly clear is that “women’s war are not men’s war”. While their grief is aestheticised—no one asks for their consent, if they wish for this violence to continue under their name.To scrutinise Operation Sindoor is an important aspect to understand the current India-Pakistan conflict, how men’s warfare is shaped around the symbolic representation of women’s bodies.
Another widely shared image that dominated social media during the India-Pakistan standoff was that of Colonel Sofia Qureshi, who, along with Commander Vyomika Singh, led the media briefing for Operation Sindoor. Inside this grand theatre of geopolitical pretentiousness, to position Colonel Qureshi — a Muslim woman— as the public face for this operation was quite evidently a textbook act of secular tokenism, but also as a co-opting of feminism in order to legitimise state-sponsored violence.
The Indian media celebrated this event as a historical milestone for the representation of Indian women in the military. However, beneath this polished façade of inclusivity lies a dark reality: the routine and normalised violence, humiliation, and lynching of Muslims and Kashmiris in this country. This veil of supposed representation is far from unity or empowerment; rather, it is meant to mask the atrocities and keep these oppressive structures intact. A minister from the ruling party, Vijay Shah’s derogatory statement against Colonel Sofia Qureshi, very quickly unmasked this falsity of inclusiveness and highlighted the underlying deep-seated hate:
“They (terrorists) killed our Hindu brothers by making them remove their clothes. PM Modi ji responded by sending their (terrorists’) sister in an Army plane to strike them in their houses. They (terrorists) made our sisters widows, so Modiji sent the sisters of their community to strip them and teach them a lesson”.
More disturbing pro-war tweets, images, and problematic headlines kept on emerging from reputed newspapers and Indian mainstream media channels. For example, The Telegraph, featured an article with the title “India makes it clear: The terrorists ‘spared’ women, but India’s women will not spare them”. Picturing the Indian military as the noble guardian of women is an insult to those women who have endured its brutality. The headlines that never go viral are the grave human rights violations caused by the Indian military in Kashmir. A 2006 report by Médicins Sans Frontières revealed how sexual violence is commonly used against Kashmiri women in order to intimidate and terrorise the whole community. Lest we forget Kunan Poshpora where four Indian army personnel raped 23 women in Kashmir under the garb of tracing militants. A similar incident took place at another Indian borderland called Manipur where Manorama was brutally raped, tortured, and shot in her genitals by the Assam Rifles. The murder of Manorama led to the nude protests organised by Manipuri women in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters.
In the Shadow of Pahalgam
The Pahalgam attack cast a long and grim shadow on the lives of Kashmiris and Indian Muslims reigniting the exhausting cycle where we are compelled to prove our loyalty to the nation every time a violence is inflicted by someone who shares our faith or identity–as if we are personally accountable for the actions of the attackers. In the aftermath, Indian journalists and influencers such as the widely popular B Boys, who has garnered 2.44 million subscribers on YouTube, was found roaming around Kashmir and pressing the locals to talk about the Pahalgam attack.
“Why don’t you say Bharat Mata ki Jai (long live mother India)? Why don’t you come out and protest? Why don’t you speak against this attack?” Locking his phone camera on uncomfortable faces, the influencer then flips the camera onto himself and delivers a verdict: “Everything seems normal… people are supporting… but whoever is supporting this attack is also a terrorist.”
Within a week the video called Yeh hai Kashmir ka Kala truth (This is Kashmir’s dark truth) gained 2.2 million views, the comment section filled with praises, the viewers virtually saluted the influencer’s courage for ‘true journalism’. Shoving cameras into people’s faces for patriotic soundbites is not journalism but a coercive ritual asking Kashmiris and Muslims to perform nationalism. What B Boys forgot to film was Kashmiri women protesting on the streets condemning this terror attack in various parts of the valley. The region’s most prominent business organization, Kashmir Traders and manufacturers Association (KTMA), spearheaded a complete shutdown.
One more clip surfaced where a journalist tries to shame a young Muslim boy for his anti-war sentiment. After pressing him to speak against Pakistan, the reporter goes on to say “Aren’t you ashamed… You are not Indian” to which the boy responds “I am Indian…everyone has a right to live”.
Here I would like to share a snippet from a short piece written by Kashmiri British Novelist Mirza Waheed called “In Kashmir, even sorrow must pass a loyalty test”. Waheed writes:
“So predictably, the audit of Kashmiri humanity is in full swing. Now Kashmiris must perform a certain kind of humanness to be certified as full beings with agency and history, with grievance and politics, hearts and souls. Not only must they feel grief, they must also declare it in bold terms, avow it and placard it….if the attached expectation didn’t imply that they must refrain from remembering or reminding others of their own limitless trauma and suffering and silencing. Since this has happened in your pretty meadow, you must show full and unconditional remorse, forget that we control the meadow, the valley, its boroughs and borders, its veins and arteries, and sit at its very heart with all our might”.
Delhi proudly announced it had attacked nine different locations in Pakistan, including Pakistan-administered Kashmir, in the name of counterterrorism. Claiming that these are ‘terrorist infrastructures’, making a special emphasis on not attacking Pakistani military facilities in an attempt to avoid any sort of escalation. Around 31 people were killed and 57 civilians were injured in Pakistan, whereas 15 civilians and 43 were injured in India due to counter-shelling by Pakistan on the border. Pakistani Minister Khawaja Asif told a news channel during the early hours of the strike that civilian areas had been targeted and there were no terrorist camps in those areas.
Those who most fervently and passionately advocate for war are often those who are least affected by its ruins. They are not the ones who lose their homes or their loved ones to airstrikes and the ruthless machinery of militarism. Many believe that a conflict ends with the last bomb dropped and with the final bullet shot. Unfortunately, war’s destruction extends far beyond the battlefield. It seeps deep into societies —- sanctioning humiliation, cloaking bigotry in patriotism and providing moral cover for the slow and systematic erasure of entire communities. The exclusion of these communities is because of their faith, ethnicity, or the fatal accident of being born in a certain country, their mere presence turns into a provocation. War mongers hardly speak of such violence as they don’t experience the closing of borders, the cruelty of being reduced to a threat. This is exactly what Kashmiris and Indian Muslims are facing daily in India, and now the Pahalgam attack has become an opportunistic excuse to further dehumanise us. Here is a list of events that took place post-Pahalgam:
Kashmiri female students being assaulted inside Indian universities, Kashmiri shawl sellers thrashed by men on the streets of Uttarakhand, Kashmiri vendors publicly assaulted by Hindu-right wing groups, 1500 Kashmiris being detained by the authorities on the suspicion of militancy, houses razed and bulldozed of Kashmiri muslims in the valley as a form of ‘justice’, disheartening visuals of families being separated at the India-Pakistan border due to abrupt cancellation of visas by the Indian government, spike in hate speeches and rallies organised by Hindu right wing groups against Muslims all over India, carts of Muslim street vendors set on fire in the state of Haryana, Hindu religious monks asking for a complete economic boycott of Muslim vendors, increased lynching of Muslims on the suspicion of carrying beef and there are many more that go undocumented.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has shared his willingness and desire to hold peace talks with India, but India has laid out its terms and conditions, declaring that peace talks will only be held if Pakistan hands over Kashmir and its terrorists to the Indian government.
Meanwhile, the lead actor in this hyper nationalistic drama Narender Modi gave a grandiose and emotionally charged speech in a rally in Bikaner, Rajasthan. Wrapped in scripted melodrama and carefully choreographed rage, like a final act of a Bollywood film. In this theatrical triumph, he gave his blockbuster performance:
“In 22 minutes we destroyed 9 terrorist locations….the world and the enemies will now witness what happens when Sindoor turns into gunpowder, on the 22nd the terrorists snatched away the Sindoor of our women after asking their religion…after this, each citizen of India took an oath that terrorism will be razed to the ground, we will give them unimaginable punishment….our government has granted the Indian army full freedom given”
Modi goes on to add “Saathiyon (friends), there will be No trade or talk with Pakistan, if there will be any talk, it will only be about handing over Kashmir to us”. Like zombiesthe crowd yet again chanted “Modi Modi”.
