Communal hatred and censorship amid India - Pakistan attacks – Southasia Weekly #65
This week in Himal
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This week, Salman Rafi Sheikh writes that Pakistan’s flawed domestic and foreign policies, especially its mishandling of Afghanistan, have led to deteriorating relations in both the United States and China. Pakistan faces hard choices if it wants to salvage its fortunes – if the establishment wants to make them.
Don’t miss Jeevan Ravindran’s story on Galkande Dhammananda, a Buddhist monk, and his quest to fight Sinhala-Buddhist extremism after Sri Lanka’s civil war.
For the next episode of the State of Southasia podcast, host Nayantara Narayanan speaks with Anuradha Bhasin, managing editor of Kashmir Times, on Kashmir’s long history of conflict, caught between India and Pakistan, in light of the recent Pahalgam attack and its aftermath.
This week in Southasia
On 7 May, India launched a series of air-strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, two weeks after the Pahalgam attack in which 26 people lost their lives. India claimed the strikes targeted nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites across Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Pakistan’s military said only six locations were hit and that 31 civilians were killed in the attacks, adding that it shot down one Indian drone near Lahore and at least two Indian airplanes, which India has not officially confirmed. Shortly afterwards, 12 civilians were killed in Poonch due to artillery shelling from Pakistan’s army. India says Pakistan has repeatedly violated the 2021 ceasefire agreement in the last two weeks, with heavy shelling reported across the Line of Control in four Jammu and Kashmir districts.
These skirmishes have been accompanied with digital censorship. X (formerly Twitter) has withheld over 8000 accounts in India, citing orders from the Indian government. The accounts include digital news portals like the Wire, the Kashmiriyat and Maktoob Media, while journalists Journalist’s X accounts, including that of the managing editor of the Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin were also blocked in India, as was the official account of X’s own Government Global Affairs team.
As tensions escalated after the Pahalgam attack, India’s mainstream media and political leadership have worked to fuel communal hate. Newspaper headlines used the words ‘justice’ and ‘payback’ when describing the 7 May air strikes, while incendiary music tracks targeted Indian Muslims as well as Pakistanis. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi’s speech after the Pahalgam attack appeared primed to deepen majoritarian sentiment. Modi dubbed the strikes ‘Operation Sindoor’, deliberately evoking the image of weeping Hindu widows in order to justify the attacks. This rhetoric is already leading to collective punishment, with Muslims across Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand being threatened or attacked. Much of the attacks have impacted Kashmiris, with reports of evictions, assaults on street vendors and harassment of students. Residents of Kashmir, who are caught in the middle, have called for de-escalation and expressed fear that any further attacks will lead to more civilian deaths.
The spiralling tensions put an effective end to the ceasefire that, against the odds, had held along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan in recent years, offering some much-needed respite to those who live alongside it. From the Himal archive, this piece by Auqib Javeed is a reminder of the fruits of peace, and of what is being lost as the war drums beat louder.
From the archive (June 2023)