Anyone still trying to locate the rock bottom on Indian social media is on a fool’s errand. Every time I think the loudest, self-appointed Right-wing patriots on X have plumbed the absolute depths, they hit a fresh crater. This week’s spectacular low is the coordinated assault on Himanshi Narwal and Aarti R Menon, survivors of the Pahalgam terrorist attack, for the unpardonable sin of calling for peace over vengeance. These keyboard warriors shape our national discourse… and we let them.
The Pahalgam terrorist attack on 22 April ripped through India, and the fiction of “normalcy in Kashmir” furthered by our government. It’s undoubtedly one of the most horrific incidents in modern India, where militants stormed a tourist site, singling out Hindu victims after demanding to know their religion. Among the 26 dead was Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, honeymooning in Kashmir with his wife, Himanshi. The couple, both in their twenties, had been married for only six days.
A photograph of Himanshi crumbled beside her slain husband’s body in the Baisaran meadows became the defining image of national heartbreak. Within hours, that photo—and later, a Ghiblified version of it—had been shared thousands of times. Right-wing ideologues particularly amplified the image to push their own agendas against Kashmiris, Indian Muslims, and Islam at large.
Narwal’s personal tragedy offered social media a blank canvas to paint its own nationalistic fantasies of annihilating Pakistan. After all, nothing drives engagement like a young woman draped in grief.
And then, a few days after everyone had already spoken for her, Narwal spoke for herself. That’s when all the care and concern curdled.
Virulent misogyny
At a blood donation camp organised on what would have been her husband’s 27th birthday, Narwal called for peace, not vengeance. “We don’t want people going against Muslims or Kashmiris,” she said. “We want peace and only peace. Of course, we want justice, but the government must take precise steps against specifically those who did us wrong.” Narwal wanted the terrorists to be brought to justice, not a community facing collective punishment.
This wasn’t in the script. The keyboard brigade had anointed her their poster girl for righteous rage, so the betrayal was unforgivable. The backlash relied on the strongest tool in the Right-wing arsenal—good old virulent misogyny.
The attacks and conspiracy theories came from every diseased corner of social media. Within hours, the Right-wing army had carried out a forensic examination of Narwal’s social media profiles, and discovered their most potent weapons: She’d studied at JNU and had Kashmiri friends. In the Right-wing imagination, those are the gateway drugs to treason. That was enough to state that she had a “hand in getting her husband killed”. Her call for peace was twisted into an “agenda to absolve terrorists and cheer Pakistan”.
This grotesque cyber-stalking found old posts supporting Justice for Asifa and liking a Kashmiri peer’s photographs, and were all presented as evidence of her “jihadi soch”. They questioned whether the Pahalgam trip was “her idea”. One post on X even stated that “there was an insider leak… how do we know if she shared her itinerary with her ‘boys’?” Another rued: “How did Navy Lieutenant Vinay Narwal fail to do a background check of Himanshi before getting married. This sounds like she trapped him to death.” Yet others labelled her an ISI psy op, and suggested that she would walk away with all the compensation for “only six days” of marriage. Narwal’s attackers also included politicians.
Many strains of misogyny combined in a comment on one of her videos, demanding to know if she would say the same things if her father had been killed instead of her husband. And when Aarti R Menon, who lost her father in the terror attack, echoed similar views as Narwal, she got mercilessly dragged for it.
Menon had said that two Kashmiri taxi drivers took care of her like her brothers. “I had to wait in front of the mortuary till 3am and later return again at 6am. During this time, they accompanied me like their own sister. At the airport, I told them that I got two brothers from Kashmir. I also told them that Allah would save them,” she said.
In return, Menon was mocked for her origins, was schooled for her “secularism”, and in a widely shared tweet, was told that her parents were better off childless.
Also read: India must keep Pakistan on tenterhooks. The day of reckoning will come like a thunderbolt
Cost of patriotism
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as an X trend. This horrible spectacle falls into a clean pattern of social media hounding Indian women who’ve lost their spouses and family, but refuse to give in to jingoism.
Gurmehar Kaur, daughter of Captain Mandeep Singh, who died in the 1999 Kargil War, is the most famous example of these inquests. In 2016, Kaur held up a placard saying, “Pakistan did not kill my dad, war killed him,” and suddenly became public enemy number one. The online patriots who’d never met her father, unleashed rape threats and accused her of dishonouring his sacrifice. Celebrities, including former cricketer Virender Sehwag, had joined the pile-on.
Mita Santra, wife of CRPF jawan Babloo Santra, who was killed in the 2019 Pulwama attack, had dared to suggest that “war cannot solve every problem”. She was branded “cowardly and self-centred”. In 2018, even external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, a BJP leader, faced the mob’s fury for her purported support of an interfaith couple. Within hours, Right-wing X accounts were calling for her resignation, joking about her “Islamic” kidney. When even cabinet ministers aren’t safe from secular-bashing, what chance do ordinary women have?
But here’s the thing: Neither Narwal nor Menon needs a certificate of patriotism—especially from people whose extent of pain is getting carpal tunnel syndrome from amplifying hate.
These women have earned the right to define patriotism, and their price of admission is the loss they have suffered. It would have been completely understandable if Narwal had demanded vengeance or if Menon had given in to the communal hatred being spread in her father’s name. Instead, they chose something much harder: grace and courage. They accepted fortitude. They embraced a vision of India that seeks justice without the genocide of a community.
What would venomous Right-wing jingoists, who’ve never had to watch the life ebb out of their partner, or identify a loved one’s mutilated body, know about loss? Their patriotism is distant, performative, and costs nothing. But women who’ve lost everything and still call for peace? That’s a love so profound it refuses to give in to violence—the kind of strength that builds nations instead of burning them down.
Narwal and Menon speak for a quiet India that has stood on the sidelines, losing hope by the day—that still believes in pluralism. This is the India that can recognise humanity even when brought down to its knees. This quiet India, of reasonable discourse and constitutional values, has lost its voice in the daily tamasha of online abuse. And this is the India the X mob desperately wishes would disappear.
It isn’t Narwal and Menon’s calls for peace that terrify the Right-wing army. It’s the knowledge that this quiet India still exists. That despite their best efforts to shout down reason with rage, the soul of this nation hasn’t been completely poisoned. That a sane India might be under siege, but it isn’t dead yet.
The women these online warriors are attacking have already done the hardest thing. They’ve looked into the abyss and chosen restraint. Their appeals are proof of a strength that is incomprehensible to the digital mob and its primitive politics. The bile and unhinged conspiracy theories have already told us everything about who the real patriot is. And it’s not you, keyboard warrior.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
Why this low quality , logic and information free article ? Ask her to define “Right wing “.
1.Hundreds of jehadis kill thousands of Hindus but terror has no religion
2. Khalistanis used to stop busses and masaccare hindus , but not Khalistan doesnt represent all sikhs
Two or three morons on X ,likely handles being run from islamabad, become entire right wing ie BJP voters .
The Print you deserve better. I
We’re failing to teach children even basic manners and politeness and giving free forums to the worst among us. 100 rupees a month and most of these thought free keyboard warriors will disappear.
So true , only miss lassi can understand mrs himanshi narwal , all others are so stupid jingo types , only khatti lassi has high iq brain , bolo Tara ra ra .
Still your Pakistan lovers will not escape India’s fury
People like Karanjeet Kaur are an abomination. How cleverly she sidestepped the issue of slaughter of Hindus by terrorists in Pahalgam. Also, no mention of the anti-Hindu pogroms in Murshidabad by Jihadi Muslim mobs. Ms. Kaur wants the Hindus to choose fortitude and love. While the Jihadis and Islamists can carry on with their violence and depraved and perverted agenda.
One wonders what made Ms. Kaur suddenly come out of the stone-age cave she has been living in for the last few months and pen an article on Ms. Narwal and Ms. Menon.
Ms. Kaur’s is a classic case of being a bit too clever. She choses not to speak up on issues which don’t suit her agenda and ideology.
It is fine to say, don’t hate Muslims for Pahalgam.
This comes at a time , when people were killed for being Hindus, both in Pahalgam and Murshidabad. And there are LW propagandists out there to prove that, stories of Hindu persecution in Bangladesh is not true, just to make sure Mamta Bannerjee is not affected.
Well written…..
Ms. Karanjeet Kaur has always been a Aman ka Tamasha type and this article is another proof for the same.
Her expectations are always from Hindus. Hindu men and women must show restraint, they must never give in to hatred. While the followers of Islam are free to do as they please.
What is very clearly noticeable is how Ms. Kaur remains silent on issues which do not suit her liberal-secular agenda. She did not write on the Murshidabad riots nor did she write on the Pahalgam incident. All the while she was busy with some idiotic Goa-centric story. Now, she suddenly surfaces and choses to focus on Himanshi Narwal and Arti R Menon.
Her acts of omission and commission speak for themselves.
The Frankenstein monster was unleashed over a decade before by the RW eco system that consisted of well oiled social and news media. Now even the ones who have unleashed the monster cant control it, even if they want.
To me, it looks like we, as a society, are doomed and destined to suffocate in the ocean of hate!