Pahalgam And The Pain Of Knowing: A Nation’s Helpless Rage

What were you doing when you heard the news? Wrapping up at work and dreading the ugly commute home? Walking the dog? Watering the plants? Perhaps you were on a flight. Or in a meeting. Or in another time zone and found out about the terrorist attack only much later.

What did you think when you heard the news? Oh no, not again? A deep sigh? A rush of helpless rage? Did you have the courage to watch the disturbing visuals? Did you hear how they checked identities to confirm that the innocent civilians on holiday were Hindus before killing them in cold blood?

Or did you resignedly open your social media app of preference to check which celebrity secularist would be the first to loyally spring to the defence of the terrorists and their motivations—using hoary postmodernist arguments like false equivalences, the subjectivity of truth, or reverse virtue signalling?

What did you do, then? Tell yourself that evil can never be justified? Check to see if Prime Minister Modi was cutting short his visit to Saudi Arabia?

No, you didn’t.

Instead, the spectrum of anguished responses covered everything from rants against ‘desert cults’, banger posts slam-dunking handles which tried to rationalize the attack, demands for the destruction of Pakistan, and chronological reasoning linking the hate speech made a few days previously by Pakistani General Asim Munir (against Hindus and India) with the massacre at Pahalgam.

The more military-minded social media warriors dusted off their assiduously collated orders of battle, of both the Pakistani and Indian armies. They pulled out their maps (high-quality and fairly accurate, no doubt) to decide online which Indian armoured strike formation should launch its ferocious thrust into Pakistan, in which sector, on what axis.

Some posted letters to our Prime Minister online, emphatically instructing him to do this or that, with the grave caveat that they would be sorely disappointed if he did not take their sage advice.

To be fair, and taking into account the prevailing torment, they are not wrong in acting as they did. Indeed, from a moral standpoint, Pakistan does not have the right to exist as a sovereign state—and even less so strategically—because of all the problems they have brought to bear on us so persistently since the Partition of 1947.

The subcontinent may be large enough to accommodate more than one nation, but it is too small to bear more than one nuclear state.

We must accept that we have a Hindu-Muslim problem and that it is our soft underbelly, kept raw through a mix of a nuclear threat, a two-front threat, and domestic communal tension.

No one does anything more than pay lip service to our problems because, without a belligerent Pakistan, India would be nigh uncontrollable on the world stage. China’s hold on Tibet would be at the sufferance of Indian whim, and the Indian Ocean Region would be veritably Indian.

So, Pakistan has its uses, and its utility will only grow in step with our own economic and industrial growth.

However, precisely for these geopolitical reasons, we also have to accept that this part of our sacred geography will remain bereft of Dharma—steeped in active, belligerent, wretched antipathy towards us—until a political decision is made by South Block.

Where does that leave us? Filled with furious helplessness.

No doubt, there will be a response from the Indian government, but anything short of the destruction of the threat which Pakistan poses (in tandem with China) is simply a matter of detail. After the Uri attack, we sent in our commandos to execute a surgical strike. After Pulwama, we sent in the Air Force to exterminate terror training camps at Balakote. Perhaps this time, it will be the Navy’s turn, targeting infrastructure which causes Pakistan great pain.

But the outrage cycle will run its course, just as it did after the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. This is, unfortunately, the ressentiment of the digital age, where, for all the anguish we pour out onto social media, it amounts to nothing. Its public impact is zero. All it does is to release some of the pain we feel, by venting. The internet is the shoulder we cry on now.

Therefore, logic demands that if we are indeed to do anything, then the best thing we can do is to trust our government to do the right thing—not least because that is all we can do.

May the souls of those killed at Pahalgam find moksha. Om Shanti.