Srinagar, Nov. 24 -- After the recent blast in Delhi and the arrests that followed, former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah lamented that "all Kashmiris are now being looked at with suspicion." His outrage is understandable - nobody wants to carry the burden of a crime they did not commit. But outrage alone cannot erase a deeper reality: suspicion does not arise in a vacuum. It feeds on patterns. It grows where silence refuses to confront the uncomfortable.

The uncomfortable truth is this: whenever a terror incident involves a Kashmiri-origin individual, Kashmir's mainstream leadership, civil society, and influential voices rarely respond with the kind of loud, clear, unconditional denunciation that the rest of the country expects - and fran...