Western media’s distorted narrative on Hindu ‘colonisers’ in Kashmir – Firstpost

On April 22, 2025, when 26 people were killed in Jammu & Kashmir’s Pahalgam, one expected that the enormity of the terror strike would jolt the Western media and their Left-‘liberal’ supporters out of their slumber and force them into seeing the true jihadi nature of the so-called Kashmir movement. What should have been clear and categorical “Islamist terrorists” attacking “Hindus in Kashmir” became the saga of “gunmen” killing in “Indian-administered Kashmir”. Some reports were not even sure if this was the act of militants, thus using the term “suspected militants”.

Yes, the terrorists who took innocent lives in Pahalgam first by looking at their identity cards — and those who couldn’t show their IDs were told to recite a Muslim verse and, in extreme cases, forced to pull down their pants — were “suspected militants” for the editors of some of the leading newspapers, TV channels and news agencies in the West.

However, the subterfuge of the Western media and their Left-‘liberal’ supporters didn’t just stop at diffusing the identity of the Pahalgam victims and delegitimising Bharat’s sovereignty. They also renewed the charge of Bharat being a “settler colonial power” in Kashmir, thus accusing the victims of acting as “colonisers”. This accusation of Bharat being a “settler colonial power” in Kashmir had actually gained currency after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.

There was, in fact, an essay in The Harvard Law Review (Vol. 134, No. 7), ‘From Domicile to Dominion: India’s Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir’, in May 2021, accusing non-Kashmiris of “flooding the region”. The article said, “Although the colonial lens has been applied to Kashmir in the past, the abrogation suggests that the settler colonial lens may be more fitting. Settler colonialism is premised on the recruitment of a settler class whose goal is not only to occupy indigenous land but also to eliminate the indigenes who stand in their way. Thus, as non-Kashmiris flood the region as new residents, India’s identity as a settler state comes to the fore.”

So, according to the dominant Left-‘liberal’ worldview, a Hindu in Kashmir is a “coloniser” trying to grab the land and resources of the region. The cornered Kashmiris, this warped narrative pushed forward by the Western media would like us to believe, are thus fighting for their identity and survival. With the deft play of hands, the entire victim-perpetrator narrative has been upended. The killer isn’t a mindless, vicious killer anymore. The victim is the villain now.

This brings us to the basic questions: Whose Kashmir is it anyway? And, are Hindus really “colonisers”, and Bharat a “settler colonial power”?

As it turns out, the real story of Kashmir is not one of Hindu colonisation of the Valley, but of its forceful Islamisation, especially since the late 1980s. Those who are crying hoarse about Kashmir’s colonisation must recall how at least half a million Hindus were forced to leave their homes in the Valley to become refugees in their own country, preferring life over death, honour over incessant humiliations meted out to them just because they happened to be Hindus in Islamised Kashmir.

This exodus didn’t happen just because Jagmohan, the then Governor of J&K, created hysteria among Hindus to leave the Valley lock, stock and barrel, as a dominant section of the Left-‘liberal’ cabal wanted us to believe. This happened after a series of high-profile brutal killings, intermittent with daily betrayals and humiliations unleashed on Hindus. After a neighbourhood “friend” who would regularly take a lift from Satish Tickoo fired a bullet at him. After the killing of BK Ganju, who had hidden in a drum full of rice to escape the wrath of terrorists but was exposed by his own neighbour; thereafter, the victim’s family members were forced at gunpoint to cook the rice laced with Ganju’s blood and eat it. After the blindfolded Girja Tiku was gang-raped by four men in a moving car, and when she recognised one of them (“Aziz, are you here as well?” she asked), they took her to a wood-processing unit and cut her alive on a mechanical saw, as Rahul Pandita writes in his seminal book, Our Moon Has Blood Clots.

Jagmohan recounts in his book, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, how the assaults and killings of the Hindus had societal approval, and even the role of the police, bureaucracy, press and hospitals was dubious, to say the least. “I found that, notwithstanding the enormity of the crimes committed, the local police stations didn’t even have photographs of the wanted terrorists… When I called for the files of cases pertaining to serious crimes, I was appalled by the indifference and ineffectiveness. There was no investigation at all. Apart from recording the first information report, practically no action was taken,” Jagmohan writes.

Calling those who were forced to leave the Valley at gunpoint ‘colonisers’ would not just be a blatant lie but also a case of utter moral bankruptcy and sinister intellectual deceitfulness.

As for Bharat being a “settler colonial power”, even a cursory look at Kashmir’s past exposes its deep civilisational connections with the country as a whole. Kalidas regarded Kashmir as “more beautiful than heaven”, while Kalhan called it “the best place in the Himalayas”. As the legend goes, the Valley was originally a lake which was created after a part of Sati’s dead body fell in Kashmir during Shiva’s cataclysmic dance (tandav), creating the Satisar lake. The places where other body parts fell came to be known as Shakthi Peethas. One day, a great sage (rishi) called Kashyap arrived, and he drained the water, and thus a beautiful valley emerged out of the lake. The Rishi loved the place so much that he invited saints and scholars from other parts to populate this valley. Kashmir thus got its name from its founder, Kashyap Rishi, as Kashyapsar, Kashyapmar or Kashmir, meaning the house of Kashyap.

Given Kashmir’s association with Shiva and Sati, the region has historically been a hub of ‘Kashmir Shaivism’ (though Buddhism too found its base here, and from here it made a massive influx into Central Asia), which looks at ‘ultimate reality’ as one pure consciousness transcending across the universe. It describes Shiva as universal consciousness and his creative and cosmic power as Shakti. Such had been the spiritual-cum-intellectual aura of Kashmir that even Adi Shankaracharya, after his visit to the valley, conceded the predominance of Shakti in his Advaita philosophy. He composed poems in praise of the Goddess, such as Saudarya Lahiri and Sharada Bhujana Stotram.

Kashmir, till the end of the 13th century, was largely a Hindu state. It had the distinction of being both the hub of learning as well as a flourishing commercial centre. Kashmir, in that way, is unique, as it is believed to be the abode of Saraswati (Sharada), while at the same time Srinagar is dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi (the term Srinagar itself means the city of Lakshmi). Kashmir’s Islamic connection is not more than 700 years old, while its Sanatana link is at least 5,000 years old, if not more.

However, the life of a Hindu in Kashmir in the last 700 years has been about a series of persecutions and killings, intermittent with brief periods of respite and relief. These seven centuries saw seven major Hindu exoduses from the Valley — the first exodus took place during the reign of Sikandar Shah Miri (1389-1413 AD), infamously referred to as Sikandar Butshikan (“The Breaker of Idols”), while the last one occurred as recently as in 1990, when about half a million Hindus were forced to leave the Valley amid dire conditions.

Kashmir has been an integral part of civilisational Bharat from time immemorial. To call Hindus “colonisers” and Bharat “a settler colonial power” would, thus, be either due to deliberate media/academic distortion or lazy boilerplate reporting. How can Hindus colonise what has been their ancestral home for millennia — a land they were forced to leave under the shadow of the gun about 35 years ago? How can Bharat be a “settler colonial power” when Kashmir has been an integral part of the country’s civilisational journey since the very beginning?

Bharat is Kashmir. And Kashmir is Bharat. An umbilical cord connecting the two may have been partially damaged under Islamist attack, but Bharat’s civilisational story and national journey won’t be complete without reclaiming Kashmir in letter and spirit.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.