New Delhi, India – Strolling via the slim and crowded lanes of Jalandhar, a metropolis within the northern state of Punjab, *Aasif Dar immediately realised that “all eyes had been on me”.
They usually weren’t pleasant gazes.
“I felt like each single particular person within the crowd had vengeance of their eyes,” recalled Dar.
As Dar and a buddy stopped by an ATM, two unknown individuals approached them, asking about their ethnicity. They panicked and ran away. The subsequent morning, on April 23, Dar left his home to purchase milk. “Three males noticed me and hurled Islamophobic slurs,” mentioned Dar. “One in all them shouted, ‘He’s a Kashmiri, the whole lot occurs due to them.’”
On Tuesday, April 22, gunmen opened fireplace on vacationers in Kashmir’s resort city of Pahalgam, killing 26 vacationers and injuring a dozen others.
But, whilst New Delhi has blamed Pakistan for the assault, which was claimed by an armed group searching for secession from India, the killings have additionally opened up the nation’s spiritual and ethnic fault traces.
As Indian authorities forces proceed to hunt for the attackers in Kashmir’s dense jungles and mountains, Kashmiris residing throughout India, particularly college students, have reported heckling, harassment and threats by far-right Hindu teams – and even their classmates.
From Uttarakhand, Punjab, to Uttar Pradesh, landlords are pushing Kashmiri tenants out; and shopkeepers are refusing to commerce with them. A number of Kashmiri college students are sleeping at airports as they attempt to make their method dwelling.
Another person carried out the lethal assault. “And we are actually left right here to pay the worth,” mentioned Dar.
‘Distrust all over the place I look’
The disputed area of Kashmir is claimed in full, however dominated in components, by each India and Pakistan.
New Delhi has accused Islamabad of oblique involvement in “cross-border terrorism” and the Pahalgam assault. Pakistan refutes the allegations and says it solely gives ethical and diplomatic help to Kashmiri nationalism. It has mentioned that India has not supplied any proof of Pakistan’s involvement within the Pahalgam assault, which has left the nuclear-armed neighbours locked in a tense standoff: New Delhi has walked out of a water-sharing treaty; each nations are expelling one another’s residents and are scaling again the diplomatic strengths of their missions in one another’s capitals.
However inside India, Kashmiris are bearing the brunt of the anger over Tuesday’s assault.
Practically a dozen Kashmiris who spoke with Al Jazeera, all on situation of anonymity, mentioned they’ve locked themselves inside their rooms in at the very least seven cities of India, and keep away from any outdoors contact, together with inserting on-line orders or reserving cabs.
Dar is a second-semester pupil of anaesthesia and operation theatre expertise in Jalandhar. It’s the first time Dar has left his dad and mom, and Kashmir, to pursue increased schooling.
“There aren’t any alternatives in Kashmir, and I need to examine exhausting for my future,” he mentioned in a telephone interview. “If I do effectively right here, I will help my household.”
However the actuality is sobering for him. Along with his time period exams respiration down his neck, Dar mentioned he has grown anxious and depressed. “I’ve forgotten the whole lot that I’ve learnt in these months,” he mentioned. “There’s a fixed uncertainty – I’ll keep non-attendant [at class]; return to my dwelling, I don’t know, my head simply doesn’t work.”
“There’s distrust all over the place I look,” he mentioned. “We’re additionally cursed as a result of our face and options give away our ethnicity.”
Quickly after the assault, a number of survivor accounts emerged, suggesting that the gunmen separated the attacked vacationers by faith. Of the 26 individuals killed, 25 had been Hindu males.
However largely missed within the twister of anti-Kashmiri and anti-Muslim hate that has taken over Indian social media since Tuesday, was the id of the twenty sixth particular person killed: a Kashmiri Muslim man who tried to cease the attackers from murdering the vacationers.
“Immediately’s India runs excessive on xenophobic propaganda and that has been unleashed for some years now; most of it’s towards Muslims,” mentioned Sheikh Showkat, a political analyst and educational based mostly in Kashmir.
“Kashmiris bear a double weight: of being a Kashmiri – and a Muslim,” he mentioned. “They’re all the time the simple targets.”
‘Give this remedy to Kashmiri Muslims’
Practically 350km (217 miles) away from Jalandhar, in Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, the chief of a far-right Hindutva outfit issued a chilling warning on Tuesday.
“We gained’t look ahead to the federal government to take motion … Kashmiri Muslims, depart by 10am, else you’ll face motion you possibly can’t think about,” Lalit Sharma, the chief of the Hindu Raksha Dal mentioned in a video assertion. “Tomorrow, all our employees will depart their houses to provide this remedy to Kashmiri Muslims.”
Comparable warnings had been quickly hitting the social media feed of *Mushtaq Wani, a 29-year-old Kashmiri pupil within the metropolis.
Pursuing his grasp’s in library science, Wani, who’s older than most Kashmiri college students within the metropolis, began receiving panicked calls from others. “We took the threats severely,” he mentioned.
There’s a historical past of violence towards Kashmiris within the area: quickly after the lethal suicide bombing assault in 2019 in Pulwama, which killed at the very least 40 paramilitary personnel, Kashmiri college students had been hunted down in Dehradun, crushed up, and compelled again dwelling. A number of didn’t return to town.
“That is what our life is like,” Wani lamented. “This occurs many times – why can’t India end the militants in a single go? They’ve so many troopers and the [number of] militants [is] so much less … somebody kills somebody and our lives are upended.”
Because the threats, Wani has coordinated at the very least 15 college students’ journey again to Kashmir. As for himself, he’s sitting tight, locked inside a buddy’s dwelling, getting ready for his time period exams from subsequent week. “We’re scared and don’t really feel protected, but when I miss my exams, I stand to lose so much,” he mentioned.
Nevertheless, Wani mentioned, he felt somewhat relieved after the police arrested Sharma, the far-right chief, and guaranteed Kashmiri college students that authorities would guarantee their security.
‘Pahalgam modified the whole lot’
After movies of frightened Kashmiris, and of their bodily assault in almost half a dozen Indian cities, hit social media, Omar Abdullah, the newly elected chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, urged different state chiefs on X to make sure the security of Kashmiris.
“I request the individuals of India to not take into account the individuals of Kashmir as their enemies,” Abdullah later instructed reporters. “What occurred didn’t happen with our consent. We’re not the enemies.”
In 2019, the Indian authorities unilaterally revoked the area’s semi-autonomous standing and divided the previous state into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh – amid a communications blackout. Although Abdullah got here to energy final 12 months after the primary state legislature elections in a decade, the Jammu and Kashmir authorities right this moment has far much less energy than some other provincial administration, with New Delhi largely in cost.
*Umer Parray, a resident of south Kashmir, has been learning pharmacy in Jammu for 5 years. Muslim-majority Kashmir and Hindu-majority Jammu are two administrative blocks of the union territory.
Till Pahalgam, life had been superb in Jammu, he mentioned. “However the Pahalgam assault modified the whole lot,” he mentioned.
Earlier, Parray would go on late-night walks with pals to ice cream outlets. Because the assault, Parray has not left his dwelling in a neighbourhood the place many Kashmiri residents reside.
The evening after the assault, dozens of younger males rode via the neighbourhood on bikes – blaring horns and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”, traditionally a non secular chant and greeting that far-right teams have, in recent times, become a struggle cry.
Later, a video emerged of males beating and working after Kashmiri college students in his adjoining lane.
“Now we have by no means seen something like this,” he mentioned.
Overwhelmed for being Kashmiri muslim, a Kashmiri pupil was thrashed by mob in Janipur, Jammu final evening.
How lengthy will we be criminalized for our id? That is our dwelling too.#Kashmir #Jammu #StopTargetingKashmiris pic.twitter.com/ubFagGIrwX— Mubashir Naik (@sule_khaak) April 24, 2025
* First names of Kashmiri college students have been modified to guard their identities, amid concern of retributive assaults.