In the wee hours of Sunday, February 26th, Islamic terrorists killed yet another Kashmiri Pandit in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir. 

Sanjay Sharma, the latest victim of Islamic terrorism underway in the Valley, worked as an armed guard at a bank in his village in the Achan area. He was shot while he was going to the market, after which he was shifted to a hospital. But he succumbed to the injuries.

Kashmir Freedom Fighters, an offshoot of Pakistan-sponsored terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, released a statement claiming responsibility for the killing of Kashmiri Pandit Sanjay Sharma and issued a fresh threat of continuing to kill Kashmiri Pandits and other Hindus, living in the region, including tourists.

In a statement, it said, “Today in wee hours our cadre eliminated a Kashmiri Pandit namely Sanjay Sharma, son of Kashinath Sharma, resident of Achan Pulwama,” Waseem Mir, spokesperson of the terror outfit, said in the message.

He issued a warning to Kashmiri Pandits, Hindus and tourists of additional strikes by the group, and referred to them as “pawns of occupation.”

“We already have warned many times in the recent past that any Kashmiri pandit, Hindus or Tourists from India will be Eliminated,” the statement by the terror group said.

“After the Removal of Article 370, these people are nothing but pawns of occupation to further their settler colonialism agenda. So it’s not too far Think again or be ready for your turn,” it added, confirming that the jihadis are killing Hindus in the region in retaliation for the revocation of Article 370.

No sooner did the news of yet another Kashmiri Pandit killed in a dastardly attack come to the fore than the media was replete with news reports claiming the ‘Muslim neighbourhood was in grief’ following the attack on Sanjay Sharma.

Media organisations hesitant to attribute the attack to Islamic supremacism quickly highlighted how Muslim communities and neighbours shared the grief of the Sharma family.

But this is not the first time that media organisations tried to effect psychological manipulation by pushing a narrative that glosses over the scourge of Islamic terrorism plaguing the Valley and deflects public attention from the issue at hand.

For years now, several of the mainstream media organisations and ‘secular’ journalists have treated Islamic terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir as a hot potato—not expressly calling it out—and instead focusing on mythical interfaith harmony to cover up the religiously motivated targeted killings. Those who highlight the religious motive behind the attack are shouted down, ostracised, or even vilified—as witnessed in the wake of the release of The Kashmir Files—a movie that did not sugarcoat the reality and chronicled the unvarnished truth about the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Hindus from the early nineties.

In 2021, after a Kashmiri Pandit woman was killed in Bandipora, Kashmir, news reports of Muslim neighbourhood sharing the grief with the victim’s family started doing the rounds. 

Death of Pandit woman:
Kashmiri Muslim neighbors share grief of Pandit family

Bandipora, June 4: Muslim neighbourhood shared the grief and sorrow of a Pandit family after the death of an elderly Pandit lady in Ajar locality of North Kashmir’s Bandipora.

— JK News Wave (@JK_NewsWave) June 4, 2021

Similarly in 2022 as well, reports of Muslim neighbourhoods drowning in grief over the death of a Kashmiri Pandit were widely shared in the aftermath of a targeted killing of a Hindu.

As the lifeless body of Purna Krishan Bhat reached his native village, the entire Muslim neighbourhood sank in grief. The cries of the members of both the communities filled the air for quite some time. I write for @TheLeaflet_inhttps://t.co/HCynhUbV4T

— Gulzar Bhat (@GulzarBhatt) October 17, 2022

Even though Islamic terrorists explicitly target Hindus and make no bones about the religious bigotry that underpins their attacks, media organisations and ‘secular’ journalists continue to downplay the menace of Islamic terrorism and treachery of the Muslim residents, often by drawing attention toward how the Muslim neighbourhood of the slain victim paid condolences and sunk in grief with the bereaved families.

However, what such narratives do is that they draw a veil over the most fundamental problems facing the Kashmir society. While some neighbouring Muslims would be naturally moaning about the death of one of their Hindu domiciles but it is also a harsh reality, as per credible accounts, that many Muslim residents had rattled their Hindu neighbours to Islamic terrorists which led to their killings.

For instance, the murder of BK Ganjoo, who would have probably been alive today if it were not for his Muslim neighbours signalled Islamic terrorists about his whereabouts. In 1990, when terrorists came searching for engineer BK Ganjoo, his Muslim neighbours reportedly informed them that he had been hiding in a rice barrel. The terrorists fired multiple rounds at the rice barrel allowing the blood to drip out of the container. The rice soaked in the blood was then forcefully fed to Ganjoo’s wife.

How media and their colluders divert public attention from Islamic terrorists and Muslim mobs toward rare, obscure benevolence

But media organisations and the ‘secular’ lobby continue to cite random incidents of tolerance, which only serve to minimise the Islamic fanaticism that undergirds every targeted killing in the region. However, this perversion is not just restricted to Jammu and Kashmir. Across the country, the Left has been cunningly pushing the narrative to shield Islamists and paint them as saviours and upholders of the ‘secular ethos’ of the country.

When Hindu temples come under the attack of Islamist mobs, the secular-liberal establishment bends over backwards to divert public attention by highlighting obscure stray incidents of a Muslim group protecting a Hindu temple and using it as a broad leitmotif to muddle the reality.

In July 2019, a Muslim mob reportedly desecrated an ancient temple in the old Delhi neighbourhood of Hauz Qazi. In the heart of Delhi, a Durga Temple was desecrated, idols broken, and according to the local Hindus, the Muslim mob responsible even urinated in the temple. After simmering communal tension, Vishwa Hindu Parishad organised an event for the ‘Praan Pratishtha’ of the idols and also organised a feast for the locals (Bhandara). While the chants of Jai Shree Ram reverberated in the bylanes of Chandni Chowk, one photo of Muslims serving food to the Hindus took the media by storm.

Media organisations were replete with reports that Muslim residents came forward to serve food to the Hindus of the areas during the ritual. The underlying theme of the media reports was that peace-loving Muslims of the Aman Committee had contributed to the consecrated ritual as a gesture of peace.

Hindu activists who were present at the consecrated ceremony in Hauz Qazi and those who were a part of organising the event categorically denied these reports. VHP, the organiser of the event, said the money for the event came from donations by Hindus. The Muslims of Hauz Qazi did not pay any amount towards the Praan Pratishtha event and hence, reports that they ‘helped install new idols’ in the Durga Temple were outright lies, the VHP said.

Similarly, whether it is violence during the Muharram rally or the Ram Navami, the blame is laid on the feet of Hindus for either indulging in violence with Muslim protesters or instigating Muslims by merely carrying out a procession through what the media and liberal ideologues have come to define as ‘Muslim areas‘—a religious enclave with a Muslim majority population in a seemingly secular country. If the Left and their propagandists are to be believed, Hindus commit a crime the moment they decide to carry out their religious processions through Muslim-majority localities.

Likewise, when riots broke out in the southern metropolis of Bengaluru in August 2020, the media deftly shifted the narrative from riots caused by Islamists over a Facebook post on Prophet Muhammad to how Muslim youth formed a ‘human chain’ to ‘safeguard’ a temple from ‘unruly mob’.

Very cleverly, ‘temples’ (plural) was used as a hashtag and the religion of the ‘unruly mob’ was hidden while the religion of men in the ‘human chain’ was highlighted. Fact: The religion of the ‘unruly mob’ was also Islam. But the media organisation went ahead with the distorted narrative that Muslims formed a human chain to save a Hindu temple from an ‘unruly mob’.

Therefore, when media organisations swoon over Kashmiri Muslim residents sharing grief with their Hindu counterparts, one cannot but wonder if it is yet another attempt to sweep under the rug the growing menace of Islamic terrorism by propagating the misbegotten trope that ‘Muslim neighbourhood in grief’ over the death of a fellow Hindu.