A ghastly image emerges. Immediately, social media is flooded with swarms of polarised outrage, tempered occasionally by the apathetic silence or the calibrated cynicism of the few. Kashmir is reduced to a single picture, the latest visual to go viral.
Kashmir bleeds, the rest of India tweets. The media turnstiles keep on spinning. The cycle repeats. A new, horrifying image surfaces. Once again, India is provoked to react. Once again, India fails to reflect.
On July 1, an image of a three-year-old child sitting on top of the body of his dead grandfather, Bashir Ahmed, in Kashmir’s Sopore town, got circulated on social media. Local police issued a statement explaining that Ahmed had lost his life after being caught in the crossfire between militants and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). One CRPF officer was also reported to have been killed, while three others were injured in the face-off.
What followed was the kind of no-holds-barred visual propaganda that has become synonymous with violent incidents from the Valley. Sambit Patra, the official spokesperson of the BJP, tweeted the heart-wrenching photo with the insidious caption, “PULITZER LOVERS??” in a brazen jibe at the Pulitzer committee that had awarded three photojournalists from Jammu and Kashmir earlier this year.
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