The Killing of Hindus in Kashmir

On April 22, Muslim terrorists in Pahalgam, which is a mountain resort in the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, cornered a group of Indian tourists from other states who were holidaying in a meadow, and asked them their religion as well as their names. Most Indian names reveal a person’s religion. They checked some identity cards to confirm names. Survivors report that the terrorists asked some men to repeat the kalma, the Muslim declaration of faith.

Having thus identified the Hindus and one Christian, they shot and killed 26 men, in the presence of their wives, children and other family members. Twenty-four of the men were Hindus, one was a Christian, and one was a Kashmiri Muslim worker giving horse rides who resisted an attack on the Hindu client riding his horse. The men ranged in age from young honeymooners to young fathers of toddlers to elderly fathers of grown children. The victims were from all parts of India, north, south, east, west, and north-east.

The attack was claimed by The Resistance Front, which is listed as a terrorist organization in India. It is a branch of Lashkar-e-Taiba [the Army of the Pure], a Pakistani jihadist organization whose stated aim is to merge the whole of Jammu & Kashmir with Pakistan. The state of Jammu & Kashmir includes the Muslim-majority Srinagar valley, the adjacent Hindu-majority Jammu, and the adjacent and very large Buddhist-majority region of Ladakh. Numerous countries, including the USA, UK, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Russia, list Lashkar-e-Taiba as a terrorist organization.

India has faced hundreds of Pakistan-funded attacks by Muslim terrorists over the years. The worst attack occurred in 2008, when 11 Pakistanis came by boat to Mumbai and fought a pitched battle with police for several days, taking hostages and killing 157 civilians, including Indians and foreign tourists. The terrorists especially targeted Jews.

The April 2025 attack is the worst attack on civilians since the 2008 one.

The Western Press and Islamism

The details about the victims being Hindu and the killers Muslim were available within a few hours both on Indian media and on social media. Yet, mainstream media in the West reported the attack as if it had nothing to do with religious identity. Many readers do not read whole articles; they merely look at headlines.

The BBC headline of a report by Jessica Rawnsley is “More than 20 killed after gunmen open fire on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir.” This sounds as if random gunmen decided to kill random tourists. The report states that some survivors said the gunmen had singled out “non-Muslims.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy9vyzzyjzlo

The Wall Street Journal report by Aakash Hasan and Shan Li performs an even more remarkable feat, mentioning neither Hindus nor Muslims. It is titled “Kashmir Attack Leaves 25 Dead in Indian Tourist Spot” and mentions “suspected militants” and “Indian tourists” but nothing more about the identity of either victims or killers. https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/kashmir-attack-leaves-25-dead-in-indian-tourist-spot-4aac3ead?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

CBS, not to be outdone, titles its report by Arshad R. Zargar, “Terror attack on tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir leaves at least 26 dead, officials say” and also mentions neither Hindus nor Muslims https://www.cbsnews.com/news/india-kashmir-terror-attack-tourists-killed-wounded-pahalgam/

These three reports remain up on the websites without updates as of April 30.

The New York Times headline and subtitle blame the Indian government: “Slaughter of Civilians in Kashmir Shatters an Illusion of Calm: India had claimed in recent years that its heavy-handed approach had brought peace to the long-restive region. The attack on Tuesday showed that wasn’t true.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/world/asia/kashmir-attack-india-pakistan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

This report, by Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj, was updated with the headline “India takes Aim at Pakistan after Slaughter of Civilians in Kashmir.” Hindus once again disappear, reappearing only in the sixteenth paragraph, where we are told that “a list of the victims circulating online, which was verified local officials in Kashmir, showed that 25 of the 26 killed were Hindus.”

The report now focuses on India’s retaliatory measures, and the Indian government’s “heavy-handed approach.”

The fourth photo in the article is the first one of a victim, and it is a photo of the funeral of the only Muslim killed in the attack. The fifth photo is also of mourners at his funeral. If you get that far, the sixth photo is of a Hindu’s funeral. Twenty-four Hindus are killed and there is one photo of a funeral. One Muslim is killed and there are two photos of his funeral.

Driving Out Hindus

This is far from the first attack on Hindus in Kashmir. In 1990, Muslim terrorists in Kashmir unleashed a massive attack on Kashmiri Hindus, raping, murdering and taking over property. About 100,000 Kashmiri Hindus were forced to flee and become refugees in other parts of India. A tiny minority remains, but Hindus are still a majority in Jammu.

Jammu & Kashmir is one of 28 states in India. Its economy depends largely on tourism, mostly domestic tourism, and on the sale of handicrafts. But after 1990, it became dangerous for Hindus to visit Kashmir because of a series of terrorist attacks. The army had to maintain a constant presence in Kashmir to fight terrorism, and Islamists built up a narrative whereby the terrorists are freedom-fighters while India oppresses all Muslims, especially Kashmiri Muslims. Google any of these words or read Wikipedia entries on them and you will be fed this narrative. More on this later in this essay.

In 1949, the Indian government gave Kashmir a special status, whereby non-Kashmiri Indians were not allowed to buy property or invest in Kashmir. However, Kashmiris were allowed to live, work, and buy property anywhere they wanted in the rest of India. This made Kashmir simultaneously a favoured child and a stepchild.

Even though food and other goods were provided at special low rates to Kashmir and Kashmir’s budget is supplemented by other states, the state was impoverished because there was little investment, manufacturing or infrastructure and therefore little employment. Many Kashmiri Muslims relocated to other parts of India, studied there, bought property there, and sold their handicrafts, such as shawls and wooden and papier-mache items, in Indian cities.

Jihadist organizations funded by Pakistan were able to lure unemployed youth who remained in the state. These young men were drawn into the illegal opium trade from Afghanistan. They were also armed, taken to Pakistani training camps, and paid to engage in terrorist activity.

India’s current ruling party was re-elected in 2019. One of its electoral promises was to change this unfair and imbalanced status of Kashmir, which it did that same year. Now, other Indians can invest, buy property, live, and start businesses in Kashmir, just as Kashmiris can in the rest of India.

It is this new integration that Muslim terrorists, funded and armed by Pakistan, cannot stomach. Hence this fresh attack, intended to frighten Hindus away from living and working in Kashmir. The terrorists want a second Partition. According to them, all of Jammu & Kashmir should either become a Muslim-ruled land or else should be part of Pakistan. Hindus, Buddhists and others would have to either leave or would live as subjugated minorities.

Kashmir’s History

Kashmir has been part of India for millennia. Panini, the sixth-century BC scholar and linguist who wrote the first extant book on Sanskrit grammar, was from Kashmir, and so was Patanjali, the second-century BC author of the Yoga Sutras. The epic Mahabharata (circa 200 BC-200 AD) composed much before Islam existed, names the kingdom of Kasmira and identifies its location. Through the first millennium AD, Kashmir produced many important Hindu philosophers, poets and writers, such as Abhinavagupta. In the twelfth century, the Kashmiri historian Kalhana composed the Rajatarangini, a history of Kashmiri Hindu kings.

Kashmir is an ancient centre of Shiva worship. The Kashmiri woman mystic poet Lal Ded lived and composed her poems to Shiva in Kashmir. The Amarnath cave temple in Kashmir is an ancient temple, visited by pilgrims annually. The Rajatarangini mentions it. In 2017, terrorists attacked the pilgrims, killing seven and injuring fourteen.

After Muslim chieftains from West and Central Asia invaded India from the eleventh century onwards, the Srinagar valley gradually became a Muslim-majority area. Nevertheless, a substantial Hindu minority remained. But Islamists now claim that Kashmir has always been Muslim and should be independent of India.

At Partition, the ruler of every state in India (apart from British-controlled India, there were several states ruled by Hindu or Muslim kings) decided which country they would join. Kashmir had a Hindu king but a majority-Muslim population. The king decided to join India. Pakistan began a war and occupied a small part of Kashmir. The Indian army prevented Pakistan from occupying the rest. The U.N. decided that when Pakistan withdrew its troops from the part of Kashmir it had occupied, a referendum could be conducted among Kashmir’s population to see what they would prefer. Since Pakistan refused to withdraw, a referendum could not be held.

However, Pakistan continued to illegally foster discontent among Kashmiri Muslims and to demand that Kashmir be handed over. Despite a couple of brief wars between India and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, peace was largely maintained in Kashmir.

Present, Past and Future

After India was partitioned in 1947, to form West Pakistan and East Pakistan (the latter became Bangladesh in 1971), about 10 percent of India’s population was Muslim. Despite claims of persecution by Hindus, this population has steadily grown and is now about 17 percent, or over 200 million. India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world (after Indonesia), and even if we do not count Kashmir’s population, India still has the third-largest Muslim population. In contrast, Hindus in Pakistan now constitute less than two percent of the population and this percentage has been steadily decreasing due to forced conversion.

Muslims live all over India and have the same legal rights as other citizens. Anyone living in India knows that the vast majority of Muslims everywhere in the country lead regular lives, and are prominent in all walks of life. Muslim saints’ shrines are visited by millions of Hindus, and Muslims work as colleagues, businesspeople, employers and workers along with Hindus. But you would never know this from Western mainstream media. You would imagine that Muslims are being persecuted and killed on a daily basis in India. Unless, of course, you looked at the figures and found that the Muslim population of India has steadily grown since Partition, from 10 percent to 17 percent.

India has had several Muslim Presidents and Muslims in key cabinet positions, such as the Home Minister and several Education Ministers. By law, a Hindu cannot be Prime Minister or President of Pakistan.

Despite all this, and despite the steady increase in the Muslim population of India, Islamists and extreme leftists claim that India commits genocide against Muslims everywhere in India, that India has illegally occupied Kashmir, and that Islamist terrorists in Kashmir are freedom fighters. The day after the April 2025 attack, pro-Hamas activists began to put up memes comparing Kashmir to Gaza as an occupied land, and comparing the Kashmir killers to Hamas as freedom fighters. The same jihadists and other organizations worldwide who are determined to destroy Israel also insist that Kashmir being part of India is a result of “Hindu fascism” and that Kashmir must be free and autonomous. These organizations view Kashmir as a Muslim land and never mention Hindu residents or the Kashmiri Hindus who were driven out and turned into refugees, many of whom wish to return home.

A number of extreme leftists in India, such as Arundhati Roy, ignoring all historical evidence, claim that Kashmir has never been part of India and demand that it should become independent (or part of Pakistan). Secularists and more mainstream leftists, both in India and elsewhere, insist that terrorists, such as the killers in Kashmir, have no religion even though terrorists loudly proclaim their religion.

The only peaceful solution to the problem, in my view, is for Kashmir to be better integrated into India by having non-Muslim Indians, including Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, live, to work and invest in the Srinagar valley, as they are entitled to do, thereby making Kashmir demographically hybrid like most other states in India. This will boost Kashmir’s economy, generate employment, and encourage Kashmiri Muslims to view themselves as Kashmiris as well as Indians, not just as Kashmiris.