What is ‘Justice’ for Victims of the Pahalgam Massacre? It has to be the Truth, Not Blood-Money Propaganda

What is “justice” for the 26 people murdered in Pahalgam? Are the thousands of voices going off in fury on our phones, screens and TV studios enough to constitute justice? What words will comfort those families whose selfies in a sea of tranquil greenery with children laughing and playing around them have now turned into mournful memorials of their last moments together? What is justice beyond the verbal rage on one side of the political divide, and the performative espousal of false moral equivalence and silencing of facts by the other?

A pale glow had filled my classroom from the bright light of the overhead projector as I heard that stark question from my student. What is Justice? For them?

I realized I had paused the video just when the camera was on the white boxes transporting the dead. That’s the sobering reality we were looking at.

Media students, media professor, media moments. Media, media, media. The mania and messiah of our time, the madman in our heads talking, taunting, teasing us into scrolling, always. When, in millions of years of nature or thousands of years of recorded human history, has there been a time with a “reality” like this, hand-held and yet beyond our control, incessant and slippery, pumping us with certainties but no insights?

In just ten decades, we have entered an era where the events of the distant and lives of strangers become our own. We know so little about so many things happening in the world and yet we are asked to judge them, and judge our friends on social media, every moment anyway. What to say? What to Like? What to not say? What will they think of me if I don’t say something? Virality. Velocity. Victory. No veritas, only victory.

What is justice, for them, for the beings momentarily suspended between bodily existence and ritual immolation being respectfully seen in a white haze on a screen in San Francisco?

What was the correct answer? The word “truth” pounded in my mind, and yet, somehow, I hesitated to answer. After all, the old notions of “shared humanity” and commonsense were not what they once were.

No Justice, No Peace, Or No Truth, No Peace?

Would everyone even agree that what happened to these 26 people was a crime, a travesty, and they and their families were the ones entitled to “justice” now?

Or, sad as this is, are we obliged to patiently indulge the inevitable expert voice in academia and media which insists that this mass execution was actually itself an act of justice, for the sin of the alleged colonial occupation of Kashmir by “Hindu(tva)” India?

Is bending the truth of such a drastic, absolute, “final solution” — like purge of indigenous Hindus from their ancestral homeland, the kind of “justice” our “progressive” and idealistic artists and scholars believe will bring peace?

After all, in the heat of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians, thousands poured out into streets and college campuses to uphold that sort of idea of justice, wasn’t it?

For them, Hamas’s actions didn’t deserve punishment, but was itself justice, for many past crimes allegedly committed by the children, babies, elders, women who died that day, and others, of Israel.

Causes and effects. Chronologies. Proportions. Timing. Aucitya, appropriateness, all words swept aside by machine guns and righteous rage-filled proclamations these days.

In the days after the October 7 attacks, a poll of American voters conducted by Harvard Caps/Harris found that about 50% of 18-35 year olds believed that the attacks by Hamas were “justified.” Just. Justified. Justice.  Decolonization was so chill, bro! Let’s “hang out” again sometime!

In the old days, when someone was killed, unless he was overwhelmingly known to be a monster like Ravan or Hitler, the trajectory of causes and effects around the word “justice” would not be doubted. Even as recently as September 11, 2001, commonsense and decency meant that whoever organized the mass murder of thousands of civilians had to be found and “brought to justice.” The study of bin Ladenite and broader “grievance” against the Americans would be another thing. It had to be done, and it was; in numerous teach-ins and classes and conferences, for years afterwards in fact. We got “Islamophobia” mainstreamed in academia, art, activism, and in policy. We got the Cheney-Bush-Bipartisan Iraq war misadventure rightly panned on our righteous TV platforms like The Daily Show. We cheered when Obama won in 2008. War was over. Truth had won.

But the mass murder of civilians was not cheered, not by their own countries at least.

And here we are now, scrambling to understand whether it is socially and professionally acceptable to even think that when people say “justice” after a terrorist massacre, the word should refer to the civilians who were killed, or  the “cause” that supposedly drove the noble “gunmen” or heroic “rebels” (as Western news media like to call them) to the act of killing. This is America, or at least a swathe of its cultural, moral, and intellectual condition in recent times. It is a land where they forgot about LGBT lives after the Orlando massacre, and about a thousand other crimes demanding justice, once the contagion of justifying the murder of non-combatants for alleged complicity in “oppression” reached a tipping point.

The “Barrel of a Gun,” Yes, But Whose?

I know quite well how many of my friends who are experts in “the South Asia studies” worldview see the lives of different people in and from Kashmir.  

For some of them, it is a firm conviction that India holds Kashmir at the end of “a barrel of a gun” since ending Article 370. But the truth is, this so-called gun, of the so-called occupier Indian army, it was nowhere near Pahalgam to protect the victims at that crucial time, was it not?

For some of them, the only gun that was a problem was the Indian army’s, even when it wasn’t there. For them, the gun that expelled almost the entire lot of Kashmir’s Hindus in one day in 1990, does not even exist; it appears to them instead like a delicate medieval poet’s feather-tipped pen, exuding sweet vapors and scents of interfaith harmony. For them, even admitting that only “a few thousand” Kashmiri Hindus remain there after “approximately 300-600,000” were expelled, does not matter. They will say this, and in the next line, insist that the charge of Hindu genocide is simply an “emotionally charged belief held by the right.”

The Only “Final Solution” Being Advanced is the Elimination of Hindus

Is bending the truth of such a drastic, absolute, “final solution” — like purge of indigenous Hindus from their ancestral homeland, the kind of “justice” our “progressive” and idealistic artists and scholars believe will bring peace?

Again, I maintain: “No Justice No Peace” has devolved into a pretext for just “No Peace,” or, even more starkly: “Kafir/Heathen/Hindu Lives Don’t Matter.”

“Justice,” after a horrifying, absolute crime like murder, used to mean there was a shared understanding of cause and effect, actor and victim, and a shred of human empathy.

After the triumph of propaganda these last two decades, even a normal human reaction is now filtered.

I know that some of my friends will snap, squirm, avoid feeling a twinge of pain at these words. For them, Pahalgam was already justice. What follows will not be justice; it will only be jingoism, Modi, Hindu Nationalism, Trumpism, war!

Remember Everything

But for anyone with heart and eyes and ears to hear the voices of those who lost it all in Pahalgam, this advice is necessary. Recall the memory, remember how we lost our way between 9/11 and the present. After each terror attack, remember what the papers of record said (and didn’t say, more importantly).  

Remember in particular the diabolically clever terror-sanitization campaign after the 26/11 Mumbai massacre which commandeered elite op-ed readers and movie audiences into accepting that henceforth all victims of Jihadi terror would be viewed merely as recipients of “social justice” for being rich or oppressive.  Remember how the Manchester pop concert bomb blast was editorialized on TV the next day with admonitions that it was wrong to feel terrified after a terrorist attack. Remember the cars that drove themselves into crowds. Remember the thousand victims of Jihad who will never be humanized or named. Remember every little act of professional and ethical impropriety the blood-money eaters of the world press have indulged in until now.

My point, unflinchingly stark as the white glow of the Pahalgam transportation boxes before they went home, is this: we have been lied to. We have been lied to about our most fundamental, universal, undisputable reality –that murder is wrong. So is war, so is oppression, so is “occupation.” Sure. But if, in your sheer obduracy and moral-narcissistic sense of supremacy, you have not bothered to let even the sight of 26 destroyed lives and families wash you with pity and a spot of re-consideration, you have become an embodiment of injustice yourself.

You are drowning in propaganda, and you are spreading it. You have not stopped to examine what the great news agencies and outlets of the world are saying and not saying, strategically. You are the prime product, not just a customer. Your brain has been comforted into acceptance, and your once critical faculties deadened. Your heart’s life has been sapped and petrified and filled with putrid cliches and dichotomies about oppressors and oppressees fed to you by some of the wealthiest, most powerful, most ruthless regimes and actors in the world.

Truth is the Foundation of Justice

If you continue to perpetuate the myth, manufactured in the most sophisticated manner since at least 2008, that the father to a small child, husband to a young woman, or son to an aging parent, is an “accessory” to “occupation,” and you choose to forget, in the case of Kashmir, the ancestral indigenous homeland since millennia for a tradition, a language, an exalted worldview a billion people to the south of it share and call Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma; if you really think that the people who got thrown out after having lived there for centuries are the colonizers, and the ones who threw them out, the “indigenes,” you are monstrously, injuriously, deluded.

What is “justice” for Pahalgam?

In one word, it is “truth.”

And there is not a bit of it left in the mighty institutions of truth of the modern world; not in journalism, not in universities, not in “human rights” bodies.

In the name of Mother Sharada, the great goddess of Kashmir, I pray: let us get every drop of blood-money–financed propaganda out of our heads, lives, and screens, now.

It is only where “Might is Right” that a false claim of “justice” becomes Truth.

But everywhere else, it is the Truth that must come first.

Truth is the justice I offer, with my hands in namaskaram to the deities of our ancestral lands, to my brothers and sisters and children and elders grieving wherever they are today.

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Vamsee Juluri is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. His latest book is “The Firekeepers of Jwalapuram,” part 2 of a trilogy titled “The Kishkindha Chronicles,” … “because the world was a better place when the monkeys ran the world.”