If Dhruv Rathee and Zubair had been at Pahalgam that day and stopped by the terrorists, only Zubair would have returned alive.
Not because Rathee is a foreigner, fair-skinned, or richer, but simply because he isn’t a Muslim. That’s it.
What happened in Pahalgam was purely about religion. Yet Rathee made a 20-minute video trying to propagate that it wasn’t. A strange and revealing mindset.
A major part of his video focuses on intel failure and accountability, subtly implying inside job. Yes, it was an intel failure, and accountability must be sought. But if you avoid addressing the nature of the crime itself and only highlight lapses in intel, you are effectively shifting the blame away from the criminals.
It is unrealistic to expect any country to have zero intel failures. Intel work always involves uncertainty, incomplete information, human error, misjudgments, deception by adversaries, changing ground realities, or sheer bad luck. Even top agencies like the CIA, Mossad, RAW, MI6, and FSB have faced serious failures. Imagine, the mighty CIA couldn’t predict 9/11, and Mossad was caught off-guard during the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack.
Intelligence minimizes risk, it can never eliminate it fully. Yes, questions must be asked, but only after acknowledging the crime, understanding the motives, the history, and the root cause. If I forget to latch my house and someone robs it, the fault lies with the thief, not me. You cannot hold me responsible and absolve the criminal.