Commentary: Unequal in Grief
The hard work of writing Hindu grief in a world narrative that does not look past the Hindu Right.
It was after midnight here in Atlanta. The spring air was thick with the smell of sweet olive blooms. I had just made tea, a nightly ritual to quiet the buzz of the day, when the first images from Pahalgam arrived. They came quietly on my phone. A silence that left one unprepared for the loud punctuation of shots that followed. A full stop, and then an ellipsis that trailed into silence. That silence is someone deciding that another’s life is no longer necessary.
Their meadows are red
The 26 who died. People with sunscreen in their bags, people who packed Maggi for the trip, who giggled when climbing onto nervous ponies. They did not die in war. They died in spring. Far from the sweet olives here, a massacre had bloomed in Pahalgam.
Pahalgam: a name that sounds like a lullaby. A place I know only from postcards of meadows and ponies. A place where honeymooners ride horses into the pines and return with photographs they will one day show to bored children.
That day, the honeymooners did not return in pairs. There would not be any happy pictures to show their children. There would not be any children.
Time collapses in moments of grief. I found myself collapsing with it. My breath catches in the same place every time. Grief only remembers to name the person who will not return home, not the god that was prayed to. Yet, those 26 tourists were targeted for being Hindu, men who were shot point-blank in front of their mothers, daughters, wives, sweethearts. I think of the small Ganesha idols sold in roadside stalls, the bright flowers bought with belief.
A is for Acknowledgement
I looked for acknowledgement of religious targeting in the world media and saw the narrative become more abstract. None of the reports that I read and watched in some of the most trusted worldwide media spoke of the identity of those targeted. No reports mentioned the lengths to which the terrorists went to confirm the faith of their targets.
“Tourists,” “civilians,” “Indians.” Anything but “Hindu.”
“Militants,” “gunmen,” or just “men who opened fire on civilians.” Anything but “terrorists.” Most of the worldwide narrative chose caution over clarity. We saw facts softened into euphemisms. As I scanned the headlines, most used the same passive grammar we reserve for incidents that we don’t know how to feel about.
This selective mourning reflects a discomfort with naming Hindu grief for what it is. Perhaps there was fear of being accused of bias. Perhaps there was fear of feeding Islamophobia. Perhaps there was fear of feeding the Hindu Right. But finally, the fear of feeding a narrative overrode the imperative to tell the truth.
A dead Hindu is too complicated a figure
Too Right for liberal empathy. Too privileged to be a victim. Too brown to be central. These broad brush strokes are used too often to paint the whole picture, to bury nuance under noise. And so, finally, a dead Hindu is also: Too misunderstood when out of context—which, for many of us, is complex and interwoven with history, caste, dogma, and, yes, also resistance.
To speak of Hindu grief today is to risk being suspected of complicity. And, so, it is easy or lazy or both to hide behind the weaponization of Hindu grief in India to withhold empathy. Because what does it mean to claim universality while offering conditional empathy? What greater betrayal of liberal values than to suspect grief based on who feels it? This binary flattens liberalism into a caricature, one that is indifferent to the lives of those outside its ideological comfort zone. To be liberal is to refuse to abandon complexity, to be able to hold more than one truth together.
साईं इतना दीजिए जा मे कुटुम समायसाईं समाय
मैं भी भूखा न रहूं, साधु न भूखा जायमैं जाय
Give me so much, Sai, that I may feed my kin
Enough for me, and for the stranger who knocks.
I now think of this Kabir prayer differently. I think of attention and care for nuance as a kind of food. Some narratives are fed well. Others are starved.
Silence is not neutrality
What is the cost of that starvation? What does it mean to be unseen in death? What happens when mourning is selective? In a world where deaths are stripped of context, where do we go to uncover the truth?
In my years in the U.S., I’ve watched the dead be remembered in candlelight vigils and murals, in carefully pronounced minority names on nightly news. But this time, there was silence. We need to be reminded that silence is not neutrality. It is complicity in forgetting. To name violence is not to endorse it. To identify the victims is not to demonize others.
And so, omission matters. To ignore any targeting—whether in Gaza, Rawalpindi, or Pahalgam—is a moral failure. If we claim to uphold truth and justice, we must extend that ethic across faiths and factions. The moment we weigh suffering by political usefulness, we’ve abandoned the truth.
Writing beyond binaries
I am a Hindu, an American, an Indian, a journalist. I distrust easy binaries. I believe in reporting what is hard, especially when it complicates our own side.
कबिरा खड़ा बाज़ार में माँगे सबकी खैरकबिरा खैर
ना काहू से दोस्ती, ना काहू से बैरना बैर
Kabir stood in the marketplace, wishing all well.
No friend, no enemy, just walking through the fire, barefoot.
Kabir’s words remind me of my trade of truth-tellers, barefoot in the fire, speaking without fear or faction. Because pain must not require ideological permission to be acknowledged.
We have seen what happens when grief is ignored. It festers. It calcifies. It radicalizes. When the world refuses to acknowledge the deaths of people because their suffering is politically inconvenient, it drives those affected deeper into the arms of those who will. And too often, those arms belong to extremists.
Grammar of diasporic grief
Acknowledgement anyway comes with difficulty for the diaspora. Most of us are searching for our identity between this land that has become our home and “back home.” We are caught between picking up mangoes in Indian grocery stores and their fragrance that transports us back to that land of which we speak in the past tense. We are fractured. We grieve quietly in kitchens and loudly online.
But the diaspora is not a chorus, it is an actor. With influence comes debt. With reaction comes responsibility. What I crave is a grammar of grief that does not shout. We must do better. Not just in how we respond to violence, but in how we speak of it. Not in anger, but in response. Not in memes, but in memory. Not with fire, but with care.
Remembrance as reclamation
Perhaps it is time to ask: What does solidarity mean when we are oceans away? What is our role?
To amplify? To advocate? To mourn loudly enough to be heard across time zones? Or perhaps just to remember. To refuse the forgetting. To name the dead when others will not.
Kabir writes of the clay that remembers.
माटी कहे कुम्हार से, तु क्या रौंदे मोयमाटी मोय
एक दिन ऐसा आएगा, मैं रौंदूगी तोयएक तोय
Clay to the potter: why do you knead me so?
A day will come when I will knead you.
It is past midnight again in Atlanta. The spring air still carries the scent of sweet olive. My tea cools beside me. My phone lights up in the dark. Across oceans and time zones, remembrance becomes my act of resistance.
An award-winning journalist and storyteller, Pooja Garg is Deputy Editor at Khabar. Most recently, a finalist for the Atlanta Press Club Awards, she is a USC Annenberg Fellow for Impact Writing and Community Storytelling. A storytelling and poetry workshop facilitator, she is the founder of Sakshi Storytelling. For more: linktr.ee/poojagarg
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