On an August afternoon six years ago, I called my good friend Kumar Tiku, author and United Nations project developer who happened to be a displaced Kashmiri Pandit. 

“Hello,” he picked up the phone on the very first ring. “I know why you are calling,” he chuckled. “But don’t expect me to gloat,” he said grimly. Friend, fine but on that day I was calling him just as a journalist. And he knew it.

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The year was 2019. The Government of India had just revoked Article 370 of the Constitution which accorded special status to Kashmir. 

The resolution, after receiving the endorsement of then President Ram Nath Kovind and presented in the Rajya Sabha was brought to the Lok Sabha, for discussion. Heated debates had ensued in both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament with sections of the Opposition questioning it as arbitrary. However, the decision to repeal the law which granted the states of Jammu and Kashmir autonomy except in issues of defence and foreign affairs, had eventually been passed and even received support from a few unlikely political rivals. In a tweet, then Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, said, “We support the Government on its decisions on Jammu and Kashmir.” The region since then had been counted as two Union Territories and come under the jurisdiction of the Central Government. 

If one expected uproarious celebration from all displaced Kashmiri Pandits, who had been driven out unceremoniously from their homelands by extremism, one needed to talk to someone like Kumar Tiku. He was measured in his reaction and thereby proving, demonstrating a maturity of mind which we, the best of us, often sacrifice at the alter of rage and feelings of revenge which rear its ugly head each time we hear of attacks on us – our identities of gender, race, religion. 

Yes, our blood boils when he hear of a rape or a racist attack anywhere in the world. By what I can only call a sheer universal empathy, we feel the violence vicariously. But our integral power of reasoning prevents us from indiscriminate hate. Not all who belong to the same gender or race of the perpetrators of crime are perpetrators of crime. Right? Indeed possibly by the sheer power of identifying as humans, people universally feel devasted by violations on fellow humans anywhere in the world. If not vicariously, at least empathetically. If not empathetically, at least sympathetically. At least I hope they do. Like an electromagnetic field as it were running through the entire world possibly connecting us all together as humans. The chinks in this connection are the aberrations. It is the exception, not the rule. 

The Pahalgam terrorist attack drove bullets through the hearts and souls of every Hindu, not just through the bodies of those who took them and bled to death. But like every other irrational, inexplicable attack on innocent, common people anywhere in the world, it also no doubt drove a knife through the hearts and souls of all humanity irrespective of the religions they identified with….whether Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Jains or Sikhs, even if the perpetrator of the present crime, belonged, in name, to the religion with which they identify. 

“I am a staunch Muslim and I pray, do ‘namaaz’ and keep ‘roza’, the fast during the month of Ramzan, religiously. But believe me, today, my heart is bleeding for those men, who were butchered by the men who killed them in the name of my sacred religion.” The words of a Muslim man in Kolkata. “They are neither men nor Muslims,” he said, his voice breaking with rage. “They are devils in the guise of men and haters in the guise of Muslims.” 

If common people don’t feel this but fall prey to the trap of vengeful violence in the name of avenging attacks on their identities, it could potentially destroy society. 

Even the endless footages of local Kashmiris, mostly Muslims outraged by the Pahalgam incident, coming out in protest, don’t do justice to the mutual feelings of kinship that people of different religions have shared in the entire history of religion itself. If written history is replete with horrifying accounts of religious persecutions, the unwritten history is replete with heartwarming and heartrending examples of human connections that transcend the boundaries of religion, race, gender. 

The writer is Editor, Features