By GS Seda, Retd Wing Commander, Indian Air Force
In a country that cries louder for revenge than it listens to grief, who remembers the dead of Kashmir?
Something I’ve observed—with a mix of anger and despair—is how the voices of terror attack survivors and victims’ families are almost nowhere on Indian prime-time TV. It’s a silence that stays with you. I’ve stumbled across their stories—raw, gut-wrenching—on foreign news sites or scrappy independent portals. But on the big networks? Nothing. Just angry panels, shouting slugfests, and ticker tape tantrums.
It’s a gut punch. These networks would rather pump out manufactured outrage than sit with inconvenient truths. Truths that can’t be weaponized. Truths that might complicate the script. Instead, they churn out patriotic spectacle—clickbait masquerading as a concern—while survivors remain inconvenient footnotes.
Then there’s the WhatsApp uncles. God help me. Half my relatives, friends, and coursemates fall into this category—armed with slogans, forwarding brain-dead memes at 7 a.m., treating any nuance like high treason. In their universe, grief has to wear a tricolor or it doesn’t count. Everything else? “Anti-national propaganda.” Their jingoism is a filter that blocks out reality. They don’t want the human cost—they want easy villains and hard borders.
And the diaspora… oh God! The suburban warriors in Jersey and Mississauga, sipping their Napa Red and cosplaying nationalism like it’s a Bollywood role. They tweet “Jai Hind” from 7,000 miles away, pumping their chests for a government they don’t have to live under, much less suffer under. It’s cost-free, long-distance patriotism. Never mind that many of them ghosted the country when it needed them—ditched the mess and the mess halls, chose dollars over duty—but now they drape themselves in the tricolor like it’s couture, barking orders from a continent away. They don’t want the truth—they want the thrill of performance, the dopamine of a viral quote from some Arnab Goswami-like anchor barking in Delhi.
This unholy trinity—media sellouts, WhatsApp uncles, and armchair patriots abroad—creates a feedback loop of noise, drowning out the very voices we most need to hear. They reduce loss to spectacle, mourning to propaganda, and journalism to a stunt show.
Take Himanshi Narwal, the widow of Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, who was brutally murdered during their honeymoon in Pahalgam. In the midst of her grief, she appealed to the nation for peace, urging that Muslims and Kashmiris not be targeted in retaliation. Her plea was met with a torrent of abuse, with online trolls branding her a traitor and accusing her of sympathizing with terrorists. An otherwise sane and mature NDA coursemate felt that she was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Need to see the evidence? Have a look at the collage below of abusive trolls directed her way when she appealed for peace.
It reminds me of “The Lives of Others”—that haunting film where truth was monitored, stories erased, and lives reduced to state-approved scripts. We may not have the Stasi yet, but the outcome is eerily similar: curated grief, choreographed outrage, and the quiet erasure of anything that might feel too real.
The betrayal cuts deep. And the silence—God, the silence—is deafening.
Editor’s Note: The violent trolling by the right-wing social media handles of the young widow Himanshi Narwal, just because she refused to play the Hindu-Muslim politics which benefits the ruling party, has shocked the nation. Former Wing Commander at Indian Navy poignantly expressed his pain and anguish regarding the situation on his Facebook post. With permission we have reproduced his post here. We invite Guest Columns from all concerned citizens regarding women and gender related political issues.
