New Delhi, India – Walking through the narrow and crowded lanes of Jalandhar, a city in the northern state of Punjab, *Aasif Dar suddenly realised that “all eyes were on me”.
And they weren’t friendly gazes.
“I felt like every single person in the crowd had vengeance in their eyes,” recalled Dar.
As Dar and a friend stopped by an ATM, two unknown persons approached them, asking about their ethnicity. They panicked and ran away. The next morning, on April 23, Dar left his house to buy milk. “Three men saw me and hurled Islamophobic slurs,” said Dar. “One of them shouted, ‘He is a Kashmiri, everything happens because of them.’”
On Tuesday, April 22, gunmen opened fire on tourists in Kashmir’s resort town of Pahalgam, killing 26 tourists and injuring a dozen others.
Yet, even as New Delhi has blamed Pakistan for the attack, which was claimed by an armed group seeking secession from India, the killings have also opened up the country’s religious and ethnic fault lines.
As Indian government forces continue to hunt for the attackers in Kashmir’s dense jungles and mountains, Kashmiris living across India, especially students, have reported heckling, harassment and threats by far-right Hindu groups – or even their classmates.
From Uttarakhand, Punjab, to Uttar Pradesh, landlords are pushing Kashmiri tenants out; and shopkeepers are refusing to trade with them. Several Kashmiri students are sleeping at airports as they try to make their way home.
Someone else carried out the deadly attack. “And we are now left here to pay the price,” said Dar.
‘Mistrust everywhere I look’
The disputed region of Kashmir is claimed in full, but ruled in parts, by both India and Pakistan.
New Delhi has accused Islamabad of indirect involvement in “cross-border terrorism” and the Pahalgam attack. Pakistan refutes the allegations and says it only provides moral and diplomatic support to Kashmiri nationalism. It has said that India has not provided any evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack, which has left the nuclear-armed neighbours locked in a tense standoff: New Delhi has walked out of a water-sharing treaty; both nations are expelling each other’s citizens and are scaling back the diplomatic strengths of their missions in each other’s capitals.
But inside India, Kashmiris are bearing the brunt of the anger over Tuesday’s attack.
Nearly a dozen Kashmiris who spoke with Al Jazeera, all on condition of anonymity, said they have locked themselves inside their rooms in at least seven cities of India, and avoid any outside contact, including placing online orders or booking cabs.
Dar is a second-semester student of anaesthesia and operation theatre technology in Jalandhar. It is the first time Dar has left his parents, and Kashmir, to pursue higher education.
“There are no opportunities in Kashmir, and I want to study hard for my future,” he said in a phone interview. “If I do well here, I will be able to support my family.”
But the reality is sobering for him. With his term exams breathing down his neck, Dar said he has grown anxious and depressed. “I have forgotten everything that I have learnt in these months,” he said. “There is a constant uncertainty – I may stay non-attendant [at class]; go back to my home, I don’t know, my head just does not work.”
“There is mistrust everywhere I look,” he said. “We are also cursed because our face and features give away our ethnicity.”
Soon after the attack, multiple survivor accounts emerged, suggesting that the gunmen separated the attacked tourists by religion. Of the 26 people killed, 25 were Hindu men.
But largely missed in the tornado of anti-Kashmiri and anti-Muslim hate that has taken over Indian social media since Tuesday, was the identity of the 26th person killed: a Kashmiri Muslim man who tried to stop the attackers from murdering the tourists.
“Today’s India runs high on xenophobic propaganda and that has been unleashed for some years now; most of it is against Muslims,” said Sheikh Showkat, a political analyst and academic based in Kashmir.
“Kashmiris bear a double weight: of being a Kashmiri – and a Muslim,” he said. “They are always the easy targets.”
‘Give this treatment to Kashmiri Muslims’
Nearly 350km (217 miles) away from Jalandhar, in Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, the leader of a far-right Hindutva outfit issued a chilling warning on Tuesday.
“We won’t wait for the government to take action … Kashmiri Muslims, leave by 10am, else you will face action you can’t imagine,” Lalit Sharma, the leader of the Hindu Raksha Dal said in a video statement. “Tomorrow, all our workers will leave their homes to give this treatment to Kashmiri Muslims.”
Similar warnings were soon hitting the social media feed of *Mushtaq Wani, a 29-year-old Kashmiri student in the city.
Pursuing his master’s in library science, Wani, who is older than most Kashmiri students in the city, started receiving panicked calls from others. “We took the threats seriously,” he said.
There is a history of violence against Kashmiris in the region: soon after the deadly suicide bombing attack in 2019 in Pulwama, which killed at least 40 paramilitary personnel, Kashmiri students were hunted down in Dehradun, beaten up, and forced back home. Several did not return to the city.
“This is what our life is like,” Wani lamented. “This happens again and again – why cannot India finish the militants in one go? They have so many troopers and the [number of] militants [is] so less … someone kills someone and our lives are upended.”
Since the threats, Wani has coordinated at least 15 students’ travel back to Kashmir. As for himself, he is sitting tight, locked inside a friend’s home, preparing for his term exams from next week. “We are scared and do not feel safe, but if I miss my exams, I stand to lose a lot,” he said.
However, Wani said, he felt a little relieved after the police arrested Sharma, the far-right leader, and assured Kashmiri students that authorities would ensure their safety.
‘Pahalgam changed everything’
After videos of frightened Kashmiris, and of their physical assault in nearly half a dozen Indian cities, hit social media, Omar Abdullah, the newly elected chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, urged other state chiefs on X to ensure the safety of Kashmiris.
“I request the people of India not to consider the people of Kashmir as their enemies,” Abdullah later told reporters. “What happened did not take place with our consent. We are not the enemies.”
In 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked the region’s semi-autonomous status and divided the former state into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh – amid a communications blackout. Even though Abdullah came to power last year after the first state legislature elections in a decade, the Jammu and Kashmir government today has far less power than any other provincial administration, with New Delhi largely in charge.
*Umer Parray, a resident of south Kashmir, has been studying pharmacy in Jammu for five years. Muslim-majority Kashmir and Hindu-majority Jammu are two administrative blocks of the union territory.
Until Pahalgam, life had been fine in Jammu, he said. “But the Pahalgam attack changed everything,” he said.
Earlier, Parray would go on late-night walks with friends to ice cream shops. Since the attack, Parray has not left his home in a neighbourhood where many Kashmiri residents live.
The night after the attack, dozens of young men rode through the neighbourhood on bikes – blaring horns and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”, historically a religious chant and greeting that far-right groups have, in recent years, turned into a war cry.
Later, a video emerged of men beating and running after Kashmiri students in his adjacent lane.
“We have never seen anything like this,” he said.
Beaten for being Kashmiri muslim, a Kashmiri student was thrashed by mob in Janipur, Jammu last night.
How long will we be criminalized for our identity? This is our home too.#Kashmir #Jammu #StopTargetingKashmiris pic.twitter.com/ubFagGIrwX— Mubashir Naik (@sule_khaak) April 24, 2025
* First names of Kashmiri students have been changed to protect their identities, amid fear of retributive attacks.