India had no choice

WAR IS ALWAYS ugly and painful but this time India had no choice.

- Tavleen Singh

What happened in Pahalgam was so awful, so calculatedly cruel that if some action had not been taken against the Islamist republic next door every Indian would have been left enraged, ashamed and feeling hopeless.

Pakistan's spokespersons and sympathizers have gone to extraordinary lengths to convince the world that India acted without proof that there was Pakistani involvement in the Pahalgam atrocity. They miss the point. There has been ample proof given by India in the past and it has been pointless. Besides, the kind of monsters who can shoot husbands dead before their new brides and fathers in front of their children are those who subscribe to the ideology of Pakistan.

It is the sort of ideology that breeds monsters who can behead a journalist like Daniel Pearl simply because he was Jewish. The kind of ideology that can shelter Osama bin Laden for years in a military station and lie about this to the world. What I have found depressing in the past few days is that someone as important as the American President should dismiss what happened as a fight that has gone on "for decades, maybe centuries". Donald Trump probably said what he did because the entire Western media has described India's Pahalgam response as just another war over Kashmir. This is because of Pakistani propaganda.