Western Media Once Again Ignores Plight of the Hindus of Kashmir

The decision by the Indian government to allocate a small plot of land to house pilgrims visiting the sacred Hindu shrine in Amarnath, Kashmir, provoked outrage by the state's majority Muslim population. The western media has been relentless in its coverage of how Muslim Kashmiris want independence from Hindu majority India, and how Hindu organisations in Jammu have been organising a blockade of the Kashmir Valley.

But there has been a universal blackout of one very crucial aspect of this whole issue which the media finds very convenient to ignore - the plight facing Kashmir's indigenous Hindu community. Around 400,000 Kashmiri Hindus were forced out of their ancestral homeland at gunpoint in the 1990s, and many have been languishing in refugee camps in Jammu ever since. Yet every report on the clashes in recent days has focused on how Kashmiri Muslims want secession from India, and how these demands are supposedly justified. It is as if the Kashmiri Hindus do not even exist. In fact, for all intents and purposes they do not according to the western media. To them Kashmiri is synonymous with Muslim, and feel as aggrieved as the protestors that Hindus should even be entitled to a small shrine in the Valley. Further, they refer to outfits such as the Hurriyat Conference which sympasize with and back Islamic terrorists as "moderate". Such groups were deeply involved in forcing Hindus to flee their Kashmiri homeland under threat of abduction, rape and death. If the western media finds such groups moderate, it would be quite unnerving to know what exactly they classify as an "extremist" .

While western media and politicians talk of "terrorist" threats at home, the same individuals at the highest levels speak of Kashmiri "freedom fighters" in the same breath. The irony has been lost, and it gets worse when one realises that anyone ignoring the terrorist outfits who have declared unambiguous genocide on the indigenous Hindus of Kashmir, can expect widespread media coverage. By contrast anyone who dares even ask for the situation of Kashmiri Hindus to be looked into is sidelined and marginalised.

If the controversy over Amarnath can at least change this biased perception, it would go some way in highlighting the very real misery and fear faced by the indigenous Hindu inhabitants of Kashmir.