Discrimination against or decimation of any community must be condemned and resisted. The faith or ethnicity of the victims should not be a matter of concern. Unfortunately, universal condemnation of barbarity is getting rare in modern polities. At the heart of such selective outrage lies the chicanery of politics. Consider the right-wing’s rhetoric on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. The political Right — with the Bharatiya Janata Party leading the charge — has accused successive non-BJP dispensations to be indifferent to the sufferings — killings and mass displacement — experienced by the community. The charge itself is specious: the anguish of Pandits has not gone undocumented. Ironically, there is now evidence to suggest that the BJP has done very little to alleviate their pain. A parliamentary standing committee report stated recently that only 15 per cent of the work of building 6,000 transit accommodation camps for Pandits has been completed since the pledge was made in 2015. Again, the administration of Jammu and Kashmir, now a Union territory, has put the toll of Pandits killed during three decades of militancy at 89; the figure is much lower than the data cited by the coalition government run by the Congress and the National Conference. Most members of the community have dismissed the latest casualty count.

The other — damaging — consequence of the politicization of mass suffering is the distortion of narratives. A disproportionate number of Muslims have lost their lives in militancy in Kashmir; this has been made clear by the statistics. Yet, the BJP and its sympathizers remain unwilling to be vocal about this bloodshed lest it leads to the unravelling of their carefully crafted plot of genocide against a minority community in Kashmir. A sinister silence prevails among all politicians on the slaughter, impoverishment, mass displacement and other kinds of injustices inflicted upon the marginalized — be they India’s adivasis, Dalits or even the Rohingya. This convenient repackaging of injustice leads to States being equally selective in their sympathy and — more important — resolution of humanitarian crises. The agony of Muslims and Pandits symbolize India’s political failure in Kashmir.