Francois Gautier is a very passionate Hindu/supporter of Hinduism. In his latest piece, he recounts his experiences of exhibiting a show/photographs about Kashmiri Pandits.

Earlier, the exhibition was also held at Brent Town hall, Wembley, on June 27, and at the Clyde hall, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre, Glasgow three days earlier.

Unfortunately, in spite of a good crowd, the results were not up to expectations.

First, where were the 200,000 Hindus from London and the 700,000 who live in the UK? As usual, most Hindus abroad only look after themselves, giving their children a thorough Western education and ensuring thus that they are lost forever to India. I even saw an Indian man turn his heels as soon as he saw it was something on terrorism and another woman tell me: “Don’t you think it is RSS and BJP?”

We also witnessed firsthand the basic hostility of Amnesty International to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. Sunil Bakshi had repeatedly sent invitations to them three weeks before the exhibition. I personally called the head of Kashmir at Amnesty International several times as well as Ingrid Massage, the director, Asia & Pacific Program of Amnesty. First she told us they only reported on first hand facts, I replied these were photographs and statistics which nobody could dispute. Finally, after ten phone calls, she said she had too many files on her desk and that she had no time to come, although the exhibtion was a few blocks from her office. So much for Amnesty’s sense of justice.

This is the same Amnesty International which is first to take up cudgels when the Prophet’s beloved children are harmed in any way, never mind the fact that they instigated the reaction. The same goes for the media. Political correctness in today’s world has long ago crossed the boundary of ridiculousness.

I understood also that in the West, journalists don’t go by facts, do not substantiate their writings by on the ground reporting and search for truth beyond preconceived ideas. No, they go by the politically correct, by what is said at the moment, or what is in fashion in Leftist and intellectual circles. This is not true journalism, this is the worst kind of conceited journalism.

The sad thing is that journalists in turn influence the public at large, so that many of my friends in Europe — good, sincere people — repeat with great conviction things which they do not understand and which are not based on facts: “Hindus are fundamentalists.”

The last para worries me: the peddlers of Political Correctness go by the current fashion of the day, which happens to be silence in reply to Islamic fundamentalist acts, and derogation of Hindus and Hinduism. What can be more insane than the media reaction to the Sept 11 incident? Reams of paper went into condemning the US for having “invited” disaster upon themselves! Yet, this is the same logic that the Indian press uses when Hindus are attacked in their own country: you invited it, who asked you to take a public procession to celebrate the Ganesha/Krishna/Rama festival?

In the end you are left with the realisation that nobody cares about the Kashmiri Pandits, neither abroad nor in India. They are too small a community to constitute a voting bank. They also don’t make their voices heard: they don’t blow up buses full of innocent civilians and don’t fire Kalashnikovs at crowds and, of course, they themselves are a disunited lot and except for a few beings like Sunil Bakshi or Ashok Pandit, nobody sticks his or her neck out.

A part me thinks that what has happened in Kashmir–where the original inhabitants have all but been driven out–can happen to the rest of India if this wretched disease of political correctness continues, if people in greater numbers don’t speak up against it. A part of me also thinks that Pakistan has been able to make inroads into Kashmir because of its proxmity to it. Had Pakistan surrounded us from all sides, in all four directions, it is a safe bet that they’d divide and direct their energies from all four directions, creating Kashmir-like situations in all such states.