Between Oct 20-Nov 9, 1947, ~200,000 Muslims were killed in what has since been called the “Jammu Massacre.”
Yet, this brutal event in Kashmir’s history is almost never taught in histories of India 🧵1/10
#JammuMassacre @JammuGenocide
Yet, this brutal event in Kashmir’s history is almost never taught in histories of India 🧵1/10
#JammuMassacre @JammuGenocide
The massacre was executed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the paramilitary Hindu Nationalist organization that assassinated Gandhi & is the parent organization of the BJP, VHP, etc. Current Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi is a proud and active RSS member. 2/10
The RSS was armed for the massacre by the erstwhile ruler of the Dogra princely state of Jammu & Kashmir Hari Singh in order to produce a demographic change—eliminating the Muslim population so that Jammu could be a Hindu region. 3/10
Today, this massacre is absent from discussions of why Kashmiris resisted Indian rule from 1947-present. Instead, Kashmir is just called a “conflict zone” & Kashmiris deemed terrorists, irrational fanatics, or unwitting participants in a Pakistani proxy war against India. 4/10
When the Government of India unilaterally revoked the statehood of Jammu & Kashmir in 2019 and dissolved what was left of its government & political representation, Indian newspapers & analysts unironically reported that while Kashmir opposed this action, Jammu supported it. 5/10
It is as if the Hindu majority population of Jammu was not actively created just 72 years earlier by the same Hindu Nationalist organizations running the Government of India today. 6/10
And this is the problem with many of today’s political analysts—they treat current events as if they started yesterday or are timeless, intractable problems attributable to the inherent nature of the people involved—what Mahmood Mamdani has termed “culture talk.” 7/10
Instead, current events and “conflicts” should be understood via the current configuration of power produced by specific actions taken by particular people and organizations in the not-so-distant past. 8/10
Culture talk obscures this history, allowing political & military responses to current events (likely continuous with what produced these events in the first place) to go unchecked by a confused public leaving such complicated matters to the “experts” in the government 9/10
For the sake of democracy & the agency of everyday people, we cannot let this history be drowned out by culture talk or an academic tendency to render unclear & “specialized knowledge” what is otherwise a comprehensible understanding of the past as it relates to the present 10/10
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