Kashmiris and Jews: How One Community’s Indigeneity is Weaponized to Deny Another’s Historical Ties

It’s been over a month since terrorists from Pakistan singled out and executed Hindu tourists in the Himalayan town of Pahalgam, Kashmir, sparking a major counter-terror operation by India. During this time, I have often found myself thinking about a livestream from UC Berkeley that I had watched just days before the attack. Titled “Indigeneity Has No Expiration Date,” the symposium commemorated 35 years since Kashmiri Hindus were violently expelled from their ancestral homeland. As survivors and their descendants shared their stories, I was moved to tears by the extent of loss shared and how endless it all seemed to be and yet I never imagined how quickly historical trauma would become urgent headlines following the horror of Pahalgam.

The Berkeley event, organized by student groups CYAN and Hindu YUVA, left a lasting impact. Drew Kaul, a Kashmiri Hindu born in America, described a profound connection to a homeland he had never visited. Amrita Kar spoke about the dejhor, a traditional ornament worn by Kashmiri Hindu women, symbolizing resilience amid displacement. Jeevan Zutshi highlighted political negligence enabling Islamist militancy in Kashmir, and Uphaar Kotru recounted the pain of seeing his 250-year-old ancestral home seized and occupied. Despite the pain, their resilience shone through-the indomitable spirit of survivors. It was sad yet inspiring.

The April 22 terror attack brought these testimonies into sharp relief—not because an old conflict had reignited, as the Western press suggested, but because the question of indigeneity was, once again, at the forefront of geopolitical discourse. India’s military retaliation, Operation Sindoor, initially viewed as a legitimate response to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, quickly became a target  of pearl-clutching by those who fashion themselves as peace activists. Indeed, even before the first Indian jets had taken off from their airbases, the international narrative had begun to reframe the massacre as a reaction against Indian “occupation.” Within days, media coverage marginalized the Hindu victims, implicitly recasting violence against them as legitimate. 

This narrative has played out repeatedly in other contexts, revealing a disturbing pattern in how indigenous identities are selectively recognized or erased to serve political agendas.

After the horrors of October 7, Hamas’ violence was similarly reframed as justified “resistance” against Israeli “settlers.” Activists demanded Israeli Jews “go back to Europe,” ignoring both the historical Arab migration and colonization of the Levant and millennia-old Jewish ties to the land. They also conveniently overlooked that over half of Israelis today are Mizrahi Jews whose families once inhabited the Arab world, and the other half, who are Ashkenazi, had to flee Europe precisely because they were not considered European.

On May 15, the international community commemorates Palestinian displacement after the 1948 war but there is no mention of the simultaneous expulsion of Jews from Arab lands. Historical tragedies like Baghdad’s 1941 Farhud—where hundreds of Iraqi Jews were slaughtered—eerily parallel the 1990 ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus. In both cases, longstanding communities were falsely branded as foreign agents, their indigeneity erased for political expediency. Today, their traumatic histories are relegated to inconvenient footnotes.

This selective weaponization of indigeneity frames certain groups as perpetual occupiers to advance political agendas. In North America, Khalistani separatists have adopted this tactic to great effect, portraying Sikhs in India’s Punjab as indigenous victims oppressed by a supposed ‘settler-colonial’ Indian state. This ignores India’s status as a civilizational state with diverse indigenous communities, including Hindus with ancient ties to Punjab.

Diaspora Khalistani activism frequently manifests as anti-Hindu rhetoric and violence, creating troubling irony: a movement ostensibly defending indigenous rights actively targets another indigenous community from the same region. Khalistani extremists routinely vandalize Hindu temples and threaten Hindus to “Go back to India,” positioning themselves as indigenous victims resisting colonization. This distortion erases the violent history of Khalistani militancy in Punjab and other parts of north India, during the 1980s and early 1990s, when thousands of Hindus and moderate Sikhs were killed in targeted attacks, not to mention attacks in the Diaspora including the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which remains the deadliest terror attack in Canada.

Notably, these movements also often misappropriate terminology from North American Indigenous discourse. Concepts such as “colonizer,” “settler,” and “indigenous rights,” which are specific to First Nations’ contexts, are misapplied to unrelated historical circumstances. Even the concept of “Turtle Island,” originally describing North America in certain Indigenous traditions, is co-opted to label all immigrants permanently as colonizers. The result is a hierarchy of belonging that, ironically, denies the possibility of authentic connection to any newcomer or immigrant, no matter how long they have lived in these lands.  

The problem here is that one community’s indigeneity is weaponized to deny another’s historical ties. In Kashmir, Islamist militants have sought to violently erase the region’s Sanatani core; in Israel-Palestine, Arab claims of indigeneity have aggressively aimed to obliterate Jewish historical connections to the land, and in Punjab, Khalistani claims of Sikh indigeneity are designed to expunge the region’s Hindu heritage. 

The Berkeley symposium brought this disturbing pattern into sharp focus: first, erase a community’s indigenous status, then reframe violence against them as legitimate resistance, next condemn their defensive responses as aggression, and finally rewrite history to solidify these distortions. This playbook has proven devastatingly effective across contexts. We cannot afford to be naive about the stakes here. The deliberate erasure of certain groups’ indigeneity isn’t just historical revisionism—it’s a moral license for violence. Those who manipulate indigeneity for political gain should be recognized for what they are: not champions of justice, but architects of a dangerous narrative that has repeatedly culminated in bloodshed. 

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Mayuri Mukherjee is a Ph.D student in International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.