Iltija Mufti Must Answer for Jihadism Before Attacking Hindutva
Ms Iltija Mufti,
When you declare that you “won’t allow Hindutva” in Kashmir, you speak with the confidence of moral authority. But moral authority is not asserted by volume or applause. It is earned through consistency, memory, and the willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
Before attacking Hindutva as a singular menace, it would help to look into the mirror of ideologies that have shaped Kashmir’s modern trauma and the world’s collective exhaustion. That mirror reflects jihadism, a violent political ideology that weaponises faith, sanctifies murder, and treats terror as an acceptable instrument of politics. This is not an attack on religion. It is a reckoning with an ideology whose consequences are written in blood.
Outside the narrow frame of local politics, the world has paid an enormous price for jihadist violence. New York, London, Madrid, Paris, Mumbai, Kabul, Baghdad, Nairobi. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are grave markers of a global reality where civilians were slaughtered not because of who they were individually, but because terror had been normalised as strategy. Societies across continents have been forced to harden themselves against an ideology that glorifies death and silences dissent through fear.
And yet, nowhere should this reckoning be more unavoidable than in Kashmir itself.
Long before slogans became the focus of political outrage, Kashmir witnessed one of independent India’s darkest human tragedies: the ethnic cleansing and targeted massacres of Kashmiri Pandits. Families were marked, threatened, hunted, and killed. Night-time announcements echoed with warnings. Lists appeared. Homes were abandoned in panic. An ancient community was driven out of the Valley not by debate or disagreement, but by the gun.
Those Pandits did not flee because of Hindutva.
They fled because jihadist violence replaced coexistence, and terror replaced law.
Decades later, their exile continues. Justice remains incomplete. Memory is selectively muted. And when political leaders speak of ideologies they “won’t allow,” the ideology that emptied Kashmir of one of its oldest communities is conspicuously absent from the condemnation.
This silence matters.
You are right on one principle: no citizen should be forced to chant any slogan. Coercion violates constitutional liberty, whether religious or nationalist. The law is clear on that. But constitutionalism also demands intellectual honesty. One cannot invoke freedom selectively, condemning one ideology while treating another with evasive silence despite its far greater record of violence.
Yes, fringe groups exist under many banners, including Hindutva, and when any group crosses into violence, the law must act without hesitation or bias. But moral clarity collapses when those fringes are presented as equivalent to an ideology that institutionalised suicide bombings, mass executions, and transnational terror networks. That is not balance. That is distortion.
You may find political dividends in Kashmir by projecting Hindutva as the ultimate enemy. That is a familiar and convenient narrative. But the world does not end at Kashmir’s borders. Beyond them is a global community that is weary of euphemisms, tired of moral equivalence, and exhausted by decades of jihadist terror. That world has learned, through loss, that some ideologies must be confronted honestly rather than explained away.
If ideologies are to be debated, they must be judged by their consequences, not by their political usefulness. Condemning Hindutva while refusing to confront jihadism does not strengthen pluralism. It weakens credibility. It tells victims that their suffering is negotiable, contingent on political context.
Before declaring what you “won’t allow,” acknowledge what Kashmir has already endured. Acknowledge the ideology that shattered its plural fabric, forced neighbours into exile, and turned fear into daily life. Until that mirror is faced, criticism of other ideologies will ring hollow, however loudly it is delivered.
The country does not need selective outrage. It needs honesty, memory, and the courage to name violent ideologies without hesitation, wherever they operate and whoever they benefit.
— An Indian citizen who believes ideologies must be judged by consequences, not convenience.
