Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – Ayaz Ahmad stares at his display, fingers transferring quickly as he sorts in a bunch chat on his cell phone.
Ahmad, 28, goes round homes in Hisar, a metropolis in northern India’s Haryana state, promoting shawls and different handicraft objects – like 1000’s of different itinerant merchants from Indian-administered Kashmir, who crisscross the nation on foot or bicycles.
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However a spate of hate assaults confronted by the scarf sellers in latest weeks has compelled them to rethink and strategise what was as soon as a standard, winter-time sight throughout Indian cities: Kashmiris lugging giant wraps holding shawls and different wares.
Ahmad now runs a WhatsApp group by which almost two dozen members share data as they information one another on areas to keep away from.
“I information them on the place to go and the place to keep away from as a result of some areas are superb, however others have seen harassment in opposition to our members,” Ahmad informed Al Jazeera.
“Now, our precedence is security slightly than enterprise, as harassment incidents proceed to occur to our members nearly every single day.”
‘Merely due to my id’
Ahmad fashioned the WhatsApp group late final month after a Hindu shopkeeper in northern India’s Uttarakhand state hit Tabish Ahmad Ganie, an 18-year-old Kashmiri scarf vendor, with an iron rod.
“It is a Hindu village. Kashmiri Muslims gained’t work right here in any respect,” the shopkeeper was heard shouting in a viral video of the assault, which left Ganie unconscious, whereas his elder brother Danish, who was additionally attacked, suffered minor accidents.
Ganie, a category 10 dropout, obtained 12 stitches on his head and his left arm. He’s unable to stroll attributable to fractures in his leg.
Bloodied, bandaged and carrying a sling, he informed Al Jazeera the Hindu shopkeeper was accompanied by two others as they thrashed him brutally.
“Not for something I had performed, however merely due to my id as a Kashmiri Muslim,” he stated at his dwelling in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, greater than 800km (about 500 miles) from Uttarakhand’s Vikas Nagar space the place he was attacked.
Ganie’s was not an remoted case, however a part of a rising pattern of assaults throughout India on Kashmiri merchants and migrant employees, accompanied by a drumbeat of rhetoric in opposition to the area’s folks on social media and at instances, in public speeches from influential people linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP). That rhetoric usually depicts Kashmiris as “safety threats” to India, and as “antinational” and “Pakistani brokers”.
Since Modi got here to energy in 2014, anti-Muslim hate in India has soared — usually patronised and fomented by leaders of the Hindu majoritarian BJP, and at instances legitimised by way of canine whistles by the prime minister himself.
However Kashmiri Muslims carry a double burden — their religion and their homeland are each topics of suspicion and widespread hatred in immediately’s India.
On Christmas Day, scarf vendor Bilal Ahmad was attacked by a Hindu group in Uttarakhand’s Kashipur district after he refused to chant “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (Hail Mom India), a nationalist slogan that imagines India as a mom goddess. The slogan has been weaponised by the BJP and Hindu right-wing teams, who’ve usually used it as a conflict cry of their marketing campaign in opposition to Muslims and different minorities.
Bilal stated his household grew involved after seeing a video of the assault on-line.
“They referred to as me and urged me to return to Kashmir due to the growing assaults on Kashmiris. After going through harassment, I made a decision to shut my enterprise and got here again to Kashmir,” he informed Al Jazeera.
No simple decisions
However returning to Kashmir will not be a simple alternative for a lot of.
Rampant unemployment attributable to restricted job alternatives in Kashmir usually pushes younger Kashmiris out of the area to search for livelihoods elsewhere, primarily the northern Indian states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, and the nationwide capital territory of Delhi.
Since 2019, when Modi’s authorities scrapped the area’s decades-old partial autonomy assured by the structure and introduced it underneath New Delhi’s direct management, a fledgling financial system nonetheless recovering from the aftershocks of the transfer has compounded the job disaster.
Nonetheless, anti-Kashmiri sentiments – and resultant assaults on them – spiked final 12 months after a bunch of armed males attacked Indian vacationers in Kashmir’s scenic Pahalgam space, killing 26 folks. India accused Pakistan of backing the attackers, a cost Islamabad rejected. The assault triggered a four-day air conflict between India and Pakistan — the neighbours that management components of Kashmir however declare it in full — whereas diplomatic tensions and sporting boycotts proceed.
In latest months, about 200 instances of assaults on Kashmiri college students, scarf sellers or migrant employees have been reported throughout India. Many have been crushed, threatened, harassed, and compelled to go away the areas the place they have been residing or doing enterprise.
When Bashir Ahmad visited a Hindu-majority locality in early January to promote shawls in Punjab state’s Moga district, he was stopped and requested to indicate permission to conduct his enterprise. He knew it was a mere pretext. Failing to indicate any allow, he was abused, and his bag of shawls was thrown on the bottom.
The 50-year-old man returned to Kashmir after the incident and suggested fellow scarf sellers to function solely in areas that different Kashmiris had discovered secure.
In neighbouring Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district, a retired Indian military soldier, Surjeet Rajput Guleria, abused and publicly interrogated an unidentified Kashmiri hawker on January 17, livestreaming the incident on Fb.
The video exhibits him making anti-Muslim and sexually charged remarks, accusing Kashmiris of supporting Pakistan and interesting in pelting stones at Indian troopers deployed in Kashmir. “Your sisters and daughters go to Pakistan and return pregnant,” he’s heard saying within the video.
Native media experiences stated the Kangra police filed a report in opposition to Guleria, however no additional motion was taken.
On February 1, Guleria was again once more – livestreaming his harassment of one other Kashmiri hawker, Mohammad Ramzan, on Fb.
“He threatened me and demanded that I depart the state. He went by way of my scarf bundles and mockingly accused me of carrying an AK-47 rifle as an alternative of Kashmiri shawls,” Ramzan informed Al Jazeera.
He stated such focusing on of migrants “not solely jeopardises livelihoods but in addition reinforces a local weather of worry that impacts households” depending on seasonal commerce for survival.
It isn’t simply scarf sellers who’ve suffered.
Abdul Hakeem, a resident of Kashmir’s Kulgam district, ran a fruit-selling enterprise in Punjab’s Jalandhar metropolis. He stated he confronted fixed harassment from fellow Hindu distributors, and eventually left the realm on February 6, after he was given an ultimatum to both depart the state or face penalties.
“I needed to depart fruits price about 100,000 rupees [$1,100] behind and return to the valley as a result of my household was afraid as a result of rising assaults on Kashmiris outdoors the valley,” he informed Al Jazeera.
His 50-year-old mom, Misra Begum, stated they didn’t need him to proceed his enterprise if he didn’t really feel secure. “We’d slightly go with out meals than see our son get into hassle,” she stated.
‘Troubling sample’
Kashmir’s principal political events — the governing Nationwide Convention and the opposition Peoples Democratic Occasion (PDP) — have urged the federal authorities, which successfully governs the area, to intervene and cease the assaults on Kashmiris throughout the nation.
Calling the assaults “unacceptable”, Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah stated earlier this month he had raised the difficulty at a gathering of the chief ministers of the northern Indian states and appealed to them to forestall such incidents.
Abdullah’s predecessor, Mehbooba Mufti of the PDP, alleged that the attackers operated with the backing of respective state authorities.
“[The] state governments look like granting silent patronage to mob violence, treating hatred as a shortcut to political success. The rule of legislation has been changed by politics of worry,” she wrote on X on February 3, as she shared a video about an aged Kashmiri man harassed in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh state.
BJP spokesman in Kashmir, Altaf Thakur, condemned the assaults on Kashmiri scarf sellers as “incorrect and unacceptable”. He stated the Kashmiris are an “inseparable a part of the nation” and asserted the federal government wouldn’t tolerate such actions.
However Kashmiri lawmaker, Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, informed Al Jazeera the assaults on Kashmiris are a “troubling sample” that would not be ignored as they ship “an alarming sign” to the folks of Kashmir.
“Kashmiris, significantly small merchants and scarf sellers, journey to completely different components of the nation to earn a livelihood, however repeated assaults and intimidation have been inflicting worry and insecurity,” he stated.
