*Asif Dar unapologetically realized that “all eyes were on me” as he passed through the narrow and crowded streets of Jalandhar, a city in the northern state of Punjab.
And their gazes weren’t friendly.
Dar recalled that “I felt like everyone in the audience was committing retribution.”
Two unidentified people approached them as Dar and a friend stopped by an ATM and inquired about their ethnicity. They ran away in a panic. Dar left his home the following day, April 23 to purchase milk. According to Dar, “Three men saw me and hurled islamophobic slurs.” One of them yelled, “He is a Kashmiri, everything happens for him.”
26 tourists were killed and dozens injured when gunmen opened fire on tourists in Kashmir’s resort town of Pahalgam on April 22.
The killings have also uncovered the nation’s religious and ethnic divides, even though New Delhi has attributed the attack to Pakistan, which an armed group claimed sought secession from India.
Kashmiris living across India have reported being heckled, harassed, and threatened by far-right Hindu organizations or even their classmates as the Indian government searches for the attackers in Kashmir’s dense jungles and mountains.
Shopkeepers are refusing to trade with them, and landlords are pushing Kashmiri tenants out from Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh. As they make their way home, a number of Kashmiri students are sleeping in airports.
The deadly attack was carried out by another person. Dar responded, “And we are now left here to pay the price.”
“Mistrust is everywhere I look.”
India and Pakistan both claim the entire region of Kashmir, but they also rule in some places.
Islamabad has accused the Pahalgam attack and “cross-border terrorism” of being directly involved. Pakistan refutes the accusations, claiming that it only gives moral and diplomatic support to Kashmiri nationalism. India has claimed that it has not provided any proof of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack, which has sparked a tense standoff between the nuclear-armed neighbors: both countries are evicting each other’s citizens and reducing the diplomatic effectiveness of their missions in their respective capitals.
However, Kashmiris are most enraged by the attack from Tuesday inside of India.
A further ten Kashmiris who spoke with Al Jazeera, who were speaking anonymous, claimed they had locked themselves inside their rooms in at least seven cities in India and stayed away from online purchases and cab reservations.
In Jalandhar, Dar attends a second-semester class studying anesthesia and operating theatre technology. Dar has for the first time left Kashmir and his parents to pursue higher education.
In a phone interview, he said, “I want to study hard for my future because there are no opportunities in Kashmir.” “I will be able to support my family if I do well here.”
But he finds solace in the actuality. Dar claimed that as a result of his term exams looming down his spine, he has grown anxious and depressed. He claimed, “I have forgotten everything I have learned in these months.” I may stay non-attendant [at class], return to my home, or go home because “my head just doesn’t work.”
He said, “There is mistrust everywhere I look.” Our faces and features reveal our ethnicity, and we are also cursed.
Multiple survivor accounts emerged shortly after the attack, suggesting that the gunmen had separated the attacked tourists according to their religion. 25 of the 26 people who were killed were Hindu men.
The identity of the 26th victim, a Kashmiri Muslim man who attempted to stop the attackers from killing the tourists, was largely overlooked in the roost of anti-Kashmiri and anti-Muslim sentiment that has permeated Indian social media since Tuesday.
Sheikh Showkat, a political analyst and academic from Kashmir, claimed that “today’s India is high on xenophobic propaganda that has been unleashed for some time and mostly targets Muslims.”
Being a Kashmiri and a Muslim, he said, “Kashmiris bear a double burden.” They are “the simple targets always.”
Give this treatment to Muslims from Kashmir.
The leader of a far-right Hindutva outfit issued a chilling warning on Tuesday in Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, nearly 350 kilometers (217 miles) away from Jalandhar.
Kashmiri Muslims, leave by 10am, or else you’ll face action you can’t imagine, according to Lalit Sharma, the Hindu Raksha Dal leader, in a video statement. All of our employees will leave their homes tomorrow to treat Kashmiri Muslims this way.
*Mushtaq Wani, a 29-year-old Kashmiri student in the city, was soon receiving similar warnings on his social media accounts.
Wani, who is older than the majority of Kashmiri students in the city, started getting panicked calls from others as he pursued his master’s degree in library science. He said, “We took the threats seriously.”
Kashmiris have been subjected to violence in the area: shortly after the Pulwama suicide bombing attack that left at least 40 paramilitary personnel dead, Kashmiri students were imprisoned in Dehradun, assaulted, and forced back home. Several people left the city.
Wani lamented, “This is what our life is like.” Why can’t India defeat the militants in a single attack? “This happens again and again. There are so many troopers, and there are so few militants in the country that someone kills someone and causes havoc for our lives.
Wani has coordinated the return of at least 15 students to Kashmir since the threats. For his own good, he is studying for his term exams starting the following week while locked up inside a friend’s home. We are scared and don’t feel safe, but he claimed that if I miss my exams, I could lose a lot.
Wani claimed that Sharma, the far-right leader, was apprehended by the police and that he was relieved that they had been given assurances that the authorities would protect their safety.
“Pahalgam completely altered everything,”
Omar Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir’s newly elected chief minister, pleaded with other state chiefs on X to ensure the safety of Kashmiris after videos of frightened Kashmiris and of their physical assault in nearly half a dozen Indian cities surfaced on social media.
Later, Abdullah retorted, “I request that the Indian people refrain from treating Kashmiris as their enemies.” “What transpired did not occur without our knowledge.” We are not adversaries.
In the midst of a communications blackout, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the region’s semi-autonomous status and divided the former state into Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The Jammu and Kashmir government currently has far less power than any other provincial administration, with New Delhi largely in charge.
South Kashmir resident Urs Parray has been a student of pharmacy in Jammu for five years. The union territory’s two administrative blocks are Jammu and Kashmir, which both have Hindu and Muslim populations.
Before Pahalgam, he claimed, life in Jammu had been normal. He claimed that “the Pahalgam attack changed everything.”
Prior to this, Parray would take friends on late-night walks to ice cream shops with them. Parray hasn’t left his house in a Kashmiri neighborhood where many people live since the attack.
Descent riders riding through the neighborhood the night after the attack blared horns and yelled “Jai Shri Ram,” a traditional religious anthem and a rally cry for the far-right movement that has recently been transformed into a war cry.
Later, a video of men running after Kashmiri students in his nearby lane emerged.
He claimed, “We have never seen anything like this.”
A Kashmiri student was brutalized by the mob in Janipur, Jammu, last night, despite being a Muslim and being a Muslim.
How long will identity theft be a criminal offense for us? Our home is also here. #Jammu #StopTargetingKashmiris picture https://twitter.com/ubFagGIrwX
Source: Aljazeera
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