SRINAGAR, Indian-administered Kashmir – Ayaz Ahmad stared at the screen, moving his fingers rapidly as he typed into a group chat on his cell phone.
Ahmad, 28, goes door to door in Hisar, a city in northern India’s Haryana state, selling shawls and other handicrafts. They are like the thousands of peddlers who cross the country on foot or by bicycle from Indian-administered Kashmir.
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But shawl sellers have faced a spate of hate attacks in recent weeks, forcing them to rethink and strategize what was once a common winter sight in Indian cities: Kashmiris carrying large wraps carrying shawls and other items.
Ahmad now runs a WhatsApp group with nearly 20 members sharing information and guiding each other on areas to avoid.
“In some areas there is no problem, but in other areas we see harassment of members, so I guide them where to go and where to avoid,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Our priority right now is safety over business as incidents of harassment against our members continue to occur on an almost daily basis.”
“Just because of my identity.”
Ahmad started the WhatsApp group late last month after a Hindu shopkeeper in India’s northern state of Uttarakhand beat Tabish Ahmad Ghani, an 18-year-old Kashmiri shawl seller, with an iron rod.
“This is a Hindu village. Kashmiri Muslims don’t work here at all,” the shopkeeper can be heard shouting in a video of the attack that has gone viral, leaving Ghani unconscious and his brother Danish, who was also attacked, slightly injured.
Gunny, a class 10 dropout, received 12 stitches on his head and left arm. He cannot walk because of a broken leg.
Bloodied, bandaged and slung, he told Al Jazeera that the Hindu shopkeeper was accompanied by two others and brutally beaten.
“Not because of anything I did, but simply because of my identity as a Kashmiri Muslim,” he said from his home in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, more than 800 kilometers from the attacked Vikas Nagar district in Uttarakhand state.
Ghane’s incident was not an isolated incident, but part of a growing trend across India against Kashmiri traders and migrant workers, accompanied by a drumbeat of rhetoric against local residents on social media and sometimes in public speeches by influential people associated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Its rhetoric often depicts Kashmiris as a “security threat” to India, as well as “anti-national” and “pawns of Pakistan.”
Anti-Muslim hatred in India has skyrocketed since Prime Minister Modi came to power in 2014. It was often patronized and egged on by the leadership of the Hindu-majority Bharatiya Janata Party, and sometimes justified by the prime minister’s own dog whistles.
But Kashmiri Muslims carry a double burden. Their faith and homeland are both objects of suspicion and widespread hatred in India today.
On Christmas Day, Bilal Ahmad, a shawl seller, was attacked by a group of Hindus in Uttarakhand’s Kashipur district after he refused to chant the nationalist slogan “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (Long live Mother India), which depicts India as a mother goddess. The slogan has been weaponized by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu right-wing groups, and is frequently used as a battle cry in campaigns against Muslims and other minorities.
Bilal said his family became worried after seeing the video of the attack online.
“Due to the increasing attacks on Kashmiris, they called me and urged me to return to Kashmir. After facing harassment, I decided to close my business and returned to Kashmir,” he told Al Jazeera.
There are no easy choices
But for many, returning to Kashmir is not an easy choice.
Unemployment is widespread in Kashmir due to limited job opportunities, and young Kashmiris are often forced out of the region to earn a living outside the region, primarily in northern India’s states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, and the national capital, Delhi.
Emerging economies recovering from the aftershocks of displacement have exacerbated the jobs crisis since 2019, when the Modi government scrapped the region’s decades-old constitutional guarantee of partial autonomy and placed it under direct rule from New Delhi.
But last year, anti-Kashmir sentiment and related attacks spiked after gunmen attacked Indian tourists in Kashmir’s picturesque Pahalgam district, killing 26 people. India accused Pakistan of supporting the attackers, a charge rejected by Islamabad. The attack sparked a four-day air war between neighboring countries India and Pakistan, which control parts of Kashmir but claim the entire area, amid ongoing diplomatic tensions and a sports boycott.
Around 200 attacks on Kashmiri students, shawl sellers and migrant workers have been reported across India in recent months. Many people were beaten, threatened, harassed, and forced to leave the areas where they lived or did business.
Bashir Ahmad was stopped in early January when he visited a Hindu-majority area in Punjab’s Moga district to sell shawls and was asked to show his business license. He knew it was just an excuse. For failing to produce a permit, he was abused and his bag containing a shawl was thrown to the ground.
The 50-year-old man returned to Kashmir after the incident and advised his fellow shawl sellers to only operate in areas deemed safe by other Kashmiris.
In neighboring Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district, retired Indian Army soldier Surjeet Rajput Guleria on January 17 abused and publicly interrogated an unidentified Kashmiri peddler, livestreaming the incident on Facebook.
Videos show him making anti-Islamic and sexually abusive remarks, accusing Kashmiris of supporting Pakistan, and hurling stones at Indian soldiers deployed in Kashmir. “Your sisters and daughters went to Pakistan and came back pregnant,” he can be heard saying in the video.
According to local media reports, Kangra police filed a report against Guleria, but no further action was taken.
On February 1, Guleria returned again and livestreamed his harassment of another Kashmiri peddler, Mohammad Ramzan, on Facebook.
“He threatened me and demanded that I leave the state. He searched my bundle of shawls and mockingly accused me of carrying an AK-47 rifle instead of a Kashmiri shawl,” Ramzan told Al Jazeera.
He said the targeting of such migrants “not only threatens livelihoods but also intensifies the climate of fear that affects families who rely on seasonal trade for survival.”
Shawl sellers are not the only ones affected.
Abdul Hakim, a resident of Kashmir’s Kulgam district, ran a fruit vending business in Jalandhar, Punjab. He said he finally left the area on February 6 after being constantly harassed by fellow Hindu hawkers and given an ultimatum to leave the state or face punishment.
“I had to leave behind fruits worth around Rs 100,000.” [$1,100] I stood back and returned to the valley because my family was scared because of the increasing attacks on Kashmiris outside the valley,” he told Al Jazeera.
His 50-year-old mother, Misra Begum, said she didn’t want him to stay in business if he didn’t feel safe. “I would rather go without food than see my son get into trouble,” she said.
“Troublesome pattern”
Kashmir’s main political parties, the ruling National Conference and the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), have called on the federal government, which de facto rules the region, to intervene and halt attacks on Kashmiris across the country.
Kashmir’s Prime Minister Omar Abdullah called the attack “unacceptable” and said he had raised the issue at a meeting of chief ministers from India’s northern states earlier this month, urging them to prevent such incidents.
Abdullah’s predecessor, Mehbooba Mufti of the PDP, claimed that the attackers were operating with the support of their respective state authorities.
“[The] State governments appear to be silently sponsoring mob violence and treating hatred as a shortcut to political success. The rule of law has been replaced by a politics of fear,” she wrote on X on February 3 while sharing a video about an elderly Kashmiri man being harassed in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh.
Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson for Kashmir Altaf Thakur condemned the attacks on Kashmiri shawl sellers as “wrong and unacceptable”. He said Kashmiris were an “inseparable part of the nation” and asserted that the government would not tolerate such acts.
However, Kashmiri lawmaker Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami told Al Jazeera that the attacks on Kashmir are a “troubling pattern” that cannot be ignored as they send “worrying signals” to the people of Kashmir.
“Kashmiris, especially small-scale traders and shawl sellers, travel across the country to earn a living, but repeated assaults and intimidation have caused fear and insecurity,” he said.
