Watching the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Hearing on Human Rights in South Asia was like having a front row seat to a Colonizer Board Meeting.
I knew going into the hearing that the master, Western narrative about Kashmir would dominate. I just had no idea how openly bigoted our progressive elected officials could be, running a curated story about human rights violations that relied so blatantly on circular logic, colonizing tropes, and selective concern. It also reaffirmed, for me, the deadly combination (no exaggeration) of American (United States) entitlement, exceptionalism, and willful ignorance that plagues this nation and has hurt so much of the rest of the world.
I am compelled to begin with the following observation: The United States House Foreign Affairs Committee brazenly ignored and officially erased the genocide and (seven iterations of) ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits — the indigenous people of the land — from the Kashmir Valley during its hearing on human rights violations in South Asia.
This is because the entire hearing was predicated on Hinduphobia and the specter of rampant Hindu Islamophobia. The fact that indigenous Hindus were driven from their ancestral land by militant Kashmiri Muslims is inconvenient to that narrative.
