New York: The Kashmiri Muslims have suffered the most from the terrorist attacks by Pakistan-sponsored militants and this was being ignored by the Western media and activists, Indian journalist Aarti Tikoo Singh has told a US Congressional hearing.
“What the foot-soldiers of the Pakistani military and ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) have done to ordinary Kashmiri Muslims in the last 30 years, pales in comparison to the human rights violations committed by the Indian state,” she said on Tuesday at a hearing on human rights in South Asia held by the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific in Washington.
“In the last 30 years, militants killed more Kashmiri Muslim civilians than the members of any other community in Kashmir,” she added.
The terror perpetrated by Pakistan in Kashmir “has been completely ignored and overlooked by the world press,” said the senior assistant editor at The Times of India.
She said that the Western press and a section of the Indian press present a “distorted reality of Kashmir”.
“While they are rightly highlighting the instances of violations committed by the Indian security, the story is often presented without context and historical understanding and it also carries a lot of certitude and self-righteousness of a narrative that helps the perpetrators and not the human rights abuse in Kashmir,” she added.
“There is no human rights activist and no press in the world that feels it is their moral obligation to talk or write about the victims of Pakistani terror in Kashmir,” Singh said.
She said that although she grew up in destitution as one of the Kashmiri Pandit refugees, she was appearing at the hearing not as a representative of her community but as a “conscientious journalist who believes that the duty of a journalist is to be watchdog of society”.
She spoke of Shujaat Bukhari, a senior Kashmiri journalist and peace activist who was killed by Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists.
He was killed by the terrorist group which is banned by the US and carried out the Mumbai attack in 2008 because he “wanted Pakistan to end the violence and human rights abuse in Kashmir” and “because he wanted peace,” Singh said.
A leftist Democrat, Representative Ilhan Omar, attacked Singh personally.
She said that she knew of the “enormous audience at The Times of India” and “I am aware of how the narrative shaped by reporting can distort the truth I am also aware of how it can be limited to`sharing only the official side of the story. The press is at its worst when it is a mouthpiece for a government. In your version of the story, the only problem in Kashmir are caused by what you call militants”.
Omar has in the past made light of Islamic terrorism describing the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks in 2001 that killed more than 3,000 people as “some people did something.”
Singh asked the Subcommittee Chair Brad Sherman to be allowed to respond to Omar.
She said that she had reported on various issues “from human rights violations committed in Kashmir to the lynchings over beef in the mainland India.”
She added, “I have record of being non-partisan throughout in my profession of the last 20 years. So for Ms Omar to say such accusations against me is really condemnable.”