Gaza in the Himalayas: Modi’s fantasy war and the Kashmir proving ground

Both Netanyahu and Modi understand that in the 21st century, atrocity does not need to be hidden – it only needs to be reframed. The victims must be discredited, their suffering recoded. Muslims in Gaza are ‘Hamas sympathisers.’ Kashmiris are ‘terror-adjacent.’ Once the label sticks, so does the justification.

By JUNAID S AHMAD

Over the past week, the world did not witness counterterrorism – it witnessed bloodlust masquerading as statecraft. On April 22, a deadly attack in Pahalgam claimed the lives of 26 Hindu tourists in Indian-occupied Kashmir. No group claimed responsibility, no investigation followed, no evidence was released. But New Delhi, undeterred by the absence of facts, scripted its own narrative. In this state-sponsored spectacle, truth is neither sought nor necessary. The only thing that matters is momentum – toward escalation, toward conflict, toward the mythic idea of national purification through violence.

By May 7, Indian fighter jets had crossed the Line of Control under the banner of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ bombing alleged militant sites deep inside Pakistan. The name itself – sindoor, a sacred vermillion powder used to mark Hindu matrimonial commitment – was no accident. This was not just military action; it was political pageantry steeped in religious symbolism. A performative fusion of saffron nationalism and aerial dominance. Not retaliation, but ritual. Not strategy, but spectacle. This wasn’t national defence – it was saffron-stained theatre.

The logic of the operation was not security – it was seduction. The electorate was the audience. Fighter jets were campaign tools. The dead were conscripted into a choreography of majoritarian vengeance. A mosque in Bahawalpur was among the targets. A child was among the victims. But the global reaction was not outrage – it was apathy, a shrug that grows more grotesque with every new violation. Because in today’s geopolitical theatre, whose blood matters – and whose doesn’t – is determined less by atrocity than by allegiance.

War as political pornography

We live in an age where war is not waged – it is curated. Every bomb is edited for maximum social media virality. Every strike comes with a hashtag. Every corpse must pass through a filter – are they mournable? Are they ‘strategic’? When the tourists were murdered in Pahalgam, New Delhi did not pursue justice; it pursued optics. There was no judicial inquiry, no forensic follow-up. There was only improvisation – war as spectacle, atrocity as algorithm.

The mosque strike in Bahawalpur was no aberration. It was a message. It was Modi reading from Netanyahu’s bloodstained script. In Israel, the systematic extermination of Palestinians is marketed as self-defence. In India, the destruction of Kashmiri lives is peddled as counterterrorism. In both, civilian suffering is either denied or deemed necessary. Resistance is criminalized, and mourning is rendered subversive. This is not merely military doctrine – it is ideological theatre.

From Tel Aviv with malice: The Zionist template

What unfolded in Kashmir is not an isolated Indian enterprise. It is a colonial rerun. It is the adaptation of Zionism’s most brutal chapter for Hindutva’s present ambition. Netanyahu’s ongoing genocide in Gaza – flattening hospitals, schools, refugee camps – is a grotesque performance of impunity. Modi has watched and learned.

The parallels are not accidental; they are methodical. Netanyahu’s doctrine of permanent war, his use of artificial intelligence for targeted assassinations, his manipulation of Western guilt and evangelical fervour – these have not only been admired in New Delhi but are being actively replicated. India now imports Israeli surveillance software, drones, and even battlefield ethics. It exports, in turn, a homegrown brand of majoritarian supremacy and digital authoritarianism.

Netanyahu cloaks his violence in the language of Jewish survival, while Modi sanctifies his in Hindu victimhood. Both rely on imagined past traumas to justify present atrocities. Both rule through fear, both manufacture enemies, and both weaponize religion not as a private faith but as a public threat. Zionism and Hindutva do not merely share tactics – they share a cosmology: a belief that supremacy is sacred, and conquest is redemption.

From occupation to incineration

What Gaza is enduring, Kashmir has long known. But now, occupation has morphed into something even more menacing – incineration. When Article 370 was abrogated in 2019, it wasn’t an act of governance – it was a coup wrapped in constitutional sophistry. Since then, Indian-occupied Kashmir has become a laboratory of collective punishment: mass detentions, communication blackouts, and extrajudicial killings. Every protest is sedition, every Kashmiri is a suspect.

This is not mere repression – it is infrastructural annihilation. Israeli drones hover over both Khan Younis and Kupwara. Facial recognition software developed in Tel Aviv is deployed in Srinagar. AI-driven profiling, biometric tracking, and predictive policing – once tested on Palestinians – are now part of the Indian security arsenal in Kashmir. This is not just military coordination; it is the globalisation of impunity. Genocide is being franchised.

And make no mistake: this is genocide. It is not always announced with gas chambers or mass graves. Sometimes it arrives via bureaucracy and silence, through economic strangulation and algorithmic invisibility. A people erased not only from geography, but from memory.

Normalisation of atrocity

Both Netanyahu and Modi understand that in the 21st century, atrocity does not need to be hidden – it only needs to be reframed. The victims must be discredited, their suffering recoded. Muslims in Gaza are ‘Hamas sympathisers’. Kashmiris are ‘terror-adjacent’. Once the label sticks, so does the justification. One drone strike becomes a strategy. Ten become a doctrine.

The West, long complicit in Israel’s impunity, now finds in India a profitable partner. Israel massacres civilians with American weapons. India does the same with Israeli tech. Meanwhile, the language of human rights is defanged, reduced to vague appeals to ‘restraint’ and ‘dialogue.’ In Washington, London, and Paris, trade deals matter more than war crimes. The result? War criminals pose as visionaries. Ethnic cleansers lecture the world on democracy. And media conglomerates turn bloodshed into breaking news, stripped of history, ethics, or consequence.

This is not just moral collapse – it is market logic. Murder, when properly branded, is good for business.

Escalation, then retaliation

But this time, Pakistan did not simply absorb the blow. On May 8, Islamabad launched precise counter-strikes against Indian military installations in Rajouri and Samba. This was not rhetorical posturing – it was calculated signalling. A warning that any further adventurism would have consequences. It was battlefield diplomacy conducted at supersonic speed.

And now, South Asia teeters on the precipice. Two nuclear states locked in a game of brinkmanship, each led by ideologues intoxicated with messianic visions. One misfire, one miscalculation, and the subcontinent could be reduced to ash. This is not alarmism – it is arithmetic. The region is combustible. The leadership is combustible. And the world, as ever, is distracted.

What Modi and Netanyahu are playing with is not just the fate of their enemies – it is the fate of everyone.

Hasbara meets Hindutva: Propaganda on steroids

Israel calls it hasbara – the state’s machinery of spin, euphemism, and denial. India has gone further. Under Modi, truth itself has been criminalised. Journalism is treason. Fact-checking is incitement. Dissent is anti-national. What began as a media campaign has metastasised into a surveillance state.

In Modi’s India, myth is law, and law is mythology. Anchors don’t report – they chant. Historians don’t interpret – they are hunted. Universities are not spaces for learning – they are mines for loyalty. Hindutva is not a conservative ideology – it is a supremacist theology. It imagines a Hindu state purified of difference: Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and dissenters are rendered pollutants.

The Hindutva project, like Zionism, demands not merely submission but erasure. It seeks not just dominance but homogeneity. And in both India and Israel, the state is no longer an institution – it is an altar.

When mourning is resistance

In Gaza, children are buried under collapsed concrete while Netanyahu tours military bases, grinning for cameras. In Bahawalpur, a child dies in a mosque, and India’s television anchors hail a ‘surgical success.’ In Kashmir, families mourn sons labelled as terrorists before their bodies are even recovered. This is not accidental. This is policy. Civilians are not collateral – they are targets. Mourning itself becomes resistance, a subversive act against a state that demands silence.

This is not war. It is ethnic cleansing with hashtags. It is the ritualised killing of an unwanted population, legitimised by religion, sanitised by media, and subsidised by global powers. To call it anything less is to collude in the crime.

This is not a drill

What is unfolding in Gaza and Kashmir is not a deviation from the international order – it is its logical extension. Modi is not merely watching Netanyahu – he is studying him, emulating him, and refining his playbook. Netanyahu is not merely killing Palestinians – he is mentoring a global generation of despots. This is not an alliance. It is an ideology: high-tech fascism with sacred symbols and smart bombs.

And just when the world appeared poised to plunge into the abyss, a ceasefire was declared on May 10. Both India and Pakistan agreed to halt further escalation. Enter Donald Trump, the self-anointed peacemaker, who promptly claimed credit for ‘bringing calm to the subcontinent’. That the fate of two nuclear nations could become fodder for a washed-up demagogue’s victory lap is not just absurd – it is obscene.

But let us not be fooled. The ceasefire is not peace. It is a pause. The fires still smoulder in Gaza. The surveillance towers still hum in Kashmir. And the ideology that fuels this machinery of death continues to metastasise.

The stage is burning

History will not be kind to those who watched and did nothing. To the diplomats who issued empty statements, to the media houses that parroted lies, to the citizens who turned away because the bodies were not white enough, not close enough, not human enough.

This is a call to all who claim to care about justice: The hour is late. The victims are not symbols – they are sons, daughters, families, futures. Gaza and Kashmir are not battlefields – they are crime scenes. And unless we resist – vocally, unapologetically, collectively – we are not bystanders. We are accomplices.

The next act may unfold in Karachi, Srinagar, or Rafah. But the stakes are already planetary. The question is no longer whether we will act – but whether we will have the moral courage to interrupt the machinery of annihilation before it consumes us all.

Because this is not the end of the play.

This is the moment the audience decides whether to stand up –

Or to burn with the stage.

Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).