Pahalgam and the Normalisation of Communal Hate

How should we look at these horrors in the shadow of so much unpunished violence?

Should we peer at the burning stakes and ask who among us deserved to burn?

There were revered scholars, celebrated writers and high‐ranking officials, each with their pompous self‐importance and a small, insecure shadow to hide behind the victims’ suffering.

Who, then, are Nero’s guests – those who watch cruelty with indifferent fascination or even applause?

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It is alarming, yet hardly surprising, that within hours of the Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025 – when terrorists separated men from women and children, demanding recitation of Islamic verses under threat of death – hardline voices on television and social media alike were already parroting genocidal slogans. The calls for a "Israel-like solution" in Kashmir were growing. Talk show hosts sought vengeance. An anchor said, "There needs to be a final solution." When language like this becomes primetime discourse, it is more than just incitement; it is the foundation for mass bloodshed.

This rhetorical escalation echoes harsher periods in our history, from the bloodletting of Partition to the pogroms of 1984, reminding us that communal hatred thrives when political and media elites legitimise it rather than condemn it.

When British India was divided in August 1947, an estimated 200,000 to 2,000,000 people were killed in communal violence that engulfed Punjab and Bengal, and nearly 14 million were uprooted from ancestral homes in the largest mass migration in human history. Yet, despite this staggering toll, public discourse has persistently failed to internalise these lessons: school curricula often relegate Partition to a footnote, and anniversaries are marked more by political point-scoring than by genuine reflection on the human cost of engineered division .

Forty years later, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards triggered state-sanctioned violence against the Sikh community, with conservative estimates placing the death toll at around 2,800 in Delhi alone and up to 3,350 nationwide – while independent inquiries suggest the real figure could be higher. Eyewitness accounts from Delhi describe mobs wielding voter lists to identify Sikh households, and police inaction, if not outright collusion, facilitated the carnage that unfolded over four days .

In the years since 1984, accountability has been painfully elusive: of the thousands implicated, only a handful of low-level perpetrators have ever been convicted, and those alleged to have organised the massacres remain almost untouched by the law. When similar patterns resurfaced in 2002, during the Gujarat riots – where more than 1,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslims, were killed and scores displaced – investigations stalled, key suspects walked free, and most senior figures escaped scrutiny. Editorials at the time warned that such impunity would embolden future atrocities, yet those warnings have largely gone unheeded, setting a precedent that communal violence may occur at little cost to its architects. 

Eighteen years later, in February 2020, communal violence erupted again in northeast Delhi: mobs armed with stones, petrol bombs and clubs roamed neighbourhoods, leaving at least 53 dead and hundreds injured. Once more, prosecutions focused on street-level actors, while allegations against political organisers and hate-speech instigators were largely ignored. This pattern – 1984, 2002, 2020 – has set a grim precedent: communal violence may occur at little cost to its architects, perpetuating a cycle of terror and mistrust that successive governments have failed to break.

History offers a stark reminder: the gravest atrocities rarely unfold in isolation. They advance not only on the wings of extremist rhetoric, but through the silent – or even enthusiastic – complicity of onlookers who amplify hate, legitimise calls for violence, or dismiss them as mere political discourse.

In late April, a prominent television anchor invoked just such a lesson when he framed his prime‐time debate under the provocative banner .“April 22 Is To India What October 7 Was To Israel”. By drawing that parallel, he sought to position India on the brink of a moral – and perhaps physical – abyss, much as some viewed Israel in the wake of its October 7 attacks.

Yet this modern rhetoric echoes a far older tragedy.

In July of AD 64, Rome itself was in flames. According to Tacitus, emperor Nero pointed the finger at the city’s Christian minority, declaring them responsible for the Great Fire. What followed was an orgy of cruelty: condemned prisoners were strung alight and paraded through the emperor’s newly built Domus Aurea gardens as living torches, illuminating Nero’s macabre entertainments. All around them, Rome’s most powerful citizens watched – some in horrified silence, others with grim admiration.

Both episodes – ancient and contemporary – underscore the same truth: hatred finds fertile ground not just in the speech of the few, but in the willingness of the many to look away, to cheer on cruelty, or to debate it as if it were merely another point on the political spectrum. Only by confronting this complicity can we hope to halt the descent from incendiary words to inhuman deeds.

Fast forward two millennia, and the pattern is depressingly familiar: a 2019-2020 Harvard study documented how both digital platforms and mainstream outlets in India have been systematically used to spread communal propaganda, silence dissident voices, and manufacture consent for draconian policies in Kashmir and beyond . By normalising extremist narratives, media gatekeepers already attend Nero’s feast – transforming moral outrage into spectacles that desensitise the public to suffering.

The resurgence of phrases like “final solution for Kashmir” is not mere hyperbole but a deliberate invocation of Holocaust-era euphemisms that signal an intent to eradicate a community. International bodies, including Pakistan’s delegation at the UN General Assembly, have warned that India’s troop deployments and demographic engineering in Kashmir amount to a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.

Instead of warning us about rhetoric that edges towards genocide, many TV debates and newspaper opinion pieces have calmly discussed India’s “demographic engineering” as if it were a straightforward policy option, weighing up its pros and cons. By treating dehumanising language as a mere technical question rather than a human-rights red line, these discussions make violence seem ordinary and conceal the real threat of ethnic cleansing.

In Pahalgam itself, survivors narrated how militants checked IDs, stripped victims to verify “circumcision,” and executed those unable to recite Islamic phrases—a chilling tableau of communal terror broadcast across social media within minutes. The horrified reactions of tourists – who had come seeking Kashmir’s celebrated hospitality, not sectarian violence – underscore how quickly news cycles can be hijacked by sectarian spin.

The political fallout was immediate: within twenty-four hours, the India-Pakistan land border was sealed, an Indus Waters Treaty suspension loomed, and visa exemptions for Pakistani nationals were revoked, all presented as urgent security imperatives rather than measured counterterrorism responses . Meanwhile, headlines debated whether Kashmir should be put under more force and military restriction, echoing genocidal tropes under the guise of assertive leadership .

We must break this cycle of spectacle and complicity. Journalists, editors, and broadcasters carry a responsibility not only to report facts but to contextualise the moral stakes of dehumanising rhetoric before it metastasises into violence. Politicians and opinion-makers must be held to account for language that targets vulnerable communities, and legal frameworks must be enforced to penalise hate speech that condones or incites genocide.

If we have truly learned nothing from Partition’s mass graves or the charred remains of 1984, then we remain complicit in our own decline. It is time to transform spectators into upholders of justice, to treat every ethnic slur or genocidal euphemism not as political theatre but as a clarion call for collective resistance. The final solution can only come by refusing to legitimise communal hate. We can ensure that “never again” is not just a hollow slogan, but a lived reality for every citizen.

Nirmanyu Chouhan is a researcher of politics and society.

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