Wounded by a Thousand Words

Gurmehar’s deepest frustration is that no one, not even the liberal media, has bothered to see her as a flesh and blood person with feelings.

- Barkha Dutt

When Gurmehar Kaur was six years old, her mother took her to buy kitchenware from the crowded utensils bazaar in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Her father, Captain Mandeep Singh, martyred in a militant attack in north Kashmir just a few days after the close of the Kargil war in 1999, had already been dead for three years. Gurmehar was visiting her maternal grandparents.

Suddenly, taking her unsuspecting mother by shock, the little child grabbed a knife on sale in the market and lunged towards a woman in a burkha. The woman was a stranger but the veil was an irrational trigger for anger and revulsion. “I had come to conflate all things Muslim with Pakistan, such was the rage I carried inside me,” Gurmehar told me, visibly shaken at being at the centre of a national controversy.

The young literature student has been threatened with rape, hounded, mocked and mercilessly trolled after an old pro-peace video she made last year resurfaced on social media. A placard she held up in the short film, “Pakistan did not kill my father; war killed him,” was isolated and decontextualised from the rest of the video to caricature a young woman’s simple idealism.

What most people don’t know about Gurmehar is the story of her complex and painful journey from a child who was bitter and filled with hate— “I thought every Islamic symbol, even in my own country, has something to do with Pakistan”—to this moment when she describes herself as a “peace activist.” Gurmehar says this childhood notion of subconsciously conflating Muslims with Pakistan and thus seeing both as the ‘enemy’ came from the prejudiced thoughts and words she heard around her; not in her immediate family, but neighbours, friends, their parents and so on.