As War Fever Grips the Nation, Kashmir is Left to Bury Its Children

The silence in Kashmir is never empty. It is crowded with ghosts, unspoken trauma, lullabies sung in bunkers, and prayers that ricochet through the valley like bullets. And when the silence breaks, it does not shatter, it bleeds.

The recent attack in Pahalgam, a place once synonymous with postcard beauty and saffron-scented air, has left a wound too familiar and yet, never fully felt. Militants opened fire on a tourist bus, piercing not just the bodies inside, but the illusion that Kashmir was healing. For a region long reduced to a geopolitical question mark, the attack felt like a full stop.

Tourism was Kashmir’s attempt at rebirth, a quiet plea to be seen beyond insurgency and army check-posts. The Valley’s landscapes were selling hope again—honeymooners, backpackers, Instagram influencers. But perhaps that was the most fragile illusion of all: that beauty can cancel out history, or that economic revival can exorcise centuries of siege. The attack was a grim reminder that memory, especially the collective kind, always strikes back.

In the days that followed, the situation escalated in ways grimly familiar. India launched Operation Sindoor, a retaliatory offensive positioned as a counter-insurgency drive, targeting militant hideouts along the LoC. The language of the state was swift and surgical. The symbolism of the operation’s name—Sindoor, the red powder worn by married Hindu women—did not go unnoticed, turning military action into a performative spectacle of civilizational assertion.

But history is rarely tidy. As India pounded positions across the border, Pakistan retaliated. Mortar shelling and sniper fire intensified in sectors like Poonch and Rajouri, claiming the lives of both soldiers and civilians on either side. In Poonch, homes were reduced to rubble, and families buried their dead under the same skies where fighter jets drew new borders in smoke. Kashmir, as always, bore the brunt of two nations’ unfinished histories.

And while the Valley bled, the mainland cheered. Social media feeds turned into digital war rooms—hashtags like #BadlaLo and #WipeThemOut trended as if war were a cricket match and Kashmir the stadium. There’s a disturbing comfort in this bloodlust, a national high on vengeance disguised as patriotism. The chest-thumping continues, even as Kashmir reels in blackout zones and freshly dug graves.

Kashmir is not just a territory, it is a trauma, one that India keeps re-dressing but never healing. And now, as communal hate festers and grows like a cancer in the Indian mainland, it finds resonance and rehearsal in the Valley. Violence here is no longer an isolated regional issue. It is a grotesque microcosm of a country at war with its own soul.

Pahalgam, nestled in Anantnag district, was supposed to be a symbol of return. After Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, the Indian government touted tourism as a victory—proof that integration meant peace. But peace built on denial is a mausoleum, not a home. Locals knew it. Tourists sensed it in the eyes of their hosts, in the quiet urgency with which they were told to leave before sundown.

What makes this moment particularly volatile is not just the renewed militant activity, it’s the synchronized crescendo of communal hate across the nation. Islamophobia is no longer fringe; it is mainstream, algorithm-fed and politician-sanctioned. In this climate, Kashmir is not just a place of conflict, it becomes a symbol, a scapegoat, a stage for nationalist chest-thumping and media-fuelled rage.

And yet, the actual people—Kashmiri Muslims, Pandits, Gujjars, nomads—live in limbo. Their stories are edited out of both national news coverage and political speeches. Their grief is not glamorous enough. Their loyalty is constantly questioned, their humanity conditional.

What was tourism in Kashmir if not a gentle war? A PR campaign dressed in pherans and kahwa, funded by Delhi and sold to the rest of India as progress. The returning tourists were not just consumers; they were witnesses, living proof that the valley was “safe,” “normal,” “ours.”

But whose normal is it when every other street has a gunman and every schoolchild knows the difference between pellet and bullet?

In this equation, the attack on the tourist bus was not just a crime, it was a crack in the facade. The militants didn’t just kill civilians; they killed India’s illusion that it could narrate Kashmir into submission.

There is something deeply psychological about this moment. The violence is not just physical, it’s epistemic. It’s about who gets to define truth, who gets to tell the story. Kashmir has been stripped of its voice so often that the silence now screams.

What is particularly haunting is how easily the rest of India compartmentalizes Kashmir. There is a terrifying convenience in loving the land while despising its people. Tourists will pose beside Dal Lake while supporting policies that detain local journalists without trial. They will buy papier-mâché and pashmina from artisans who’ve seen their sons beaten, their homes raided.

This cognitive dissonance is not accidental—it is cultivated.

Nationalism today is a performance, and Kashmir is the perfect backdrop. It allows for spectacle: flag-hoisting, security drills, Instagram reels with “Vande Mataram” in the background. Meanwhile, the valley weeps in private. The trauma is sanitized for export. The real stories never trend.

And in this orchestrated chaos, religion becomes the matchstick.

The communal polarization we see across India is not a coincidence, it is a pattern. From bulldozers razing Muslim homes in Uttar Pradesh to hate speech rallies disguised as religious gatherings, the script is eerily consistent. Kashmir, with its Muslim-majority demographic, is not exempt, it is central. It is the original testing ground for a nation that is becoming increasingly comfortable with the language of exclusion.

The Pahalgam attack—and what followed—comes at a time when the Indian psyche is hyper-nationalized and hyper-fragile. Any questioning of the state is branded as sedition. Any empathy for the Kashmiri experience is viewed as betrayal. We’re not just divided, we’re paranoid.

In this fever dream of ultra-patriotism, Kashmir is both the prize and the problem. And the violence there is no longer just local, it is the mirror in which we see our own descent into madness.

There’s a different kind of terror in Kashmir—the terror of forgetting. When something bleeds for so long, the world stops looking. The Valley has been anesthetized in our collective imagination. We know there is pain, but we have accepted it as part of the landscape. Like the snow, like the smoke.

And yet, for the people living there, the pain never dulls. It mutates. A child who watched her father taken in a night raid grows up with a name for justice that doesn’t exist. A man who sells apples by day but buries neighbors by night learns the art of invisibility. There is a psychology here, a coping mechanism that mimics silence but is actually survival.

The tourists will leave. The news cycle will move on. The hashtags will fade. But the valley will stay—haunted and half-heard.

We must ask: is the India that wants Kashmir even capable of loving it? Not the land, not the tourism revenue, but the people. Can we create a space where Kashmiris are not suspect, not scapegoat, not scenery, but citizens?

And more urgently: how do we reckon with the rot spreading across the country? How do we reclaim patriotism from propaganda, religion from revenge, nationalism from narcissism?

Perhaps we begin by listening. By letting Kashmir speak, not just in breaking news headlines or political manifestos, but in its own grief-heavy tongue. Perhaps we begin by mourning—because only those who mourn deeply are capable of healing honestly.

Until then, Kashmir will remain what it has always been: a poem interrupted, a prayer intercepted, a silence that bleeds.

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