Whispers of war

THIS HAS BEEN a hard piece to write. Every time I sat down to write the first sentence, images of horror from that sunny, mountainous meadow distracted me. Images of the bodies of young men, images of women weeping for dead male relatives, images of terrified children.

- TAVLEEN SINGH

Of all these images, the one that has become deeply etched in my head is that of the desolate young bride sitting beside the body of the Naval officer she married just days before coming to Pahalgam. What kind of men can deprive a newly married couple of happiness? What kind of men can kill husbands in front of their wives, fathers before children simply because they do not like their religion? Only one kind. Those so filled with hatred that their victims stop being human in their eyes.

As someone who knows Pakistan well, believe me when I tell you that every Pakistani child is brought up on hatred of Hindus and India. The reason they are taught in their school textbooks to hate India is supposedly Kashmir. And the truth is that I have never met a Pakistani, either in the drawing rooms of Lahore and Karachi, or in the streets of these cities who did not bring up Kashmir as the main reason for his hatred of India. Some have come to India and been bedazzled but the only thing that changes is that they say that if the 'Kashmir problem' was solved there would be peace with India. Their solution is that India hand Kashmir over to Pakistan. When I have dug deeper, I have found that Kashmir is only part of the problem. The real problem is that they want to think of themselves as Arabs and Persians, and not Indians. That is how deep the hatred goes.