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As Aasif Dar walked through the tight, bustling streets of Jalandhar in Punjab, he felt an unsettling shift in the crowd around him — “everyone was staring,” he recalled.
But these weren’t casual glances.
“I felt like every single person had revenge in their eyes,” Dar said.
While he and a friend stopped at an ATM, two strangers approached and asked where they were from. Alarmed, the pair ran. The following morning, on April 23, Dar stepped out to buy milk when three men hurled Islamophobic abuse at him. “One of them shouted, ‘He’s a Kashmiri — they’re the reason all this is happening,’” he said.
A day earlier, on April 22, gunmen attacked a group of tourists in the scenic town of Pahalgam in Kashmir, killing 26 and injuring several others.
Although New Delhi has blamed Pakistan for the attack — which was claimed by a militant group pushing for Kashmir’s separation from India — the fallout has once again exposed deep religious and ethnic divides in the country.
While Indian security forces continue searching for the attackers in Kashmir’s forests and mountains, Kashmiris living across India — especially students — say they’re being harassed and threatened, often by Hindu nationalist groups or even fellow classmates.
Reports have emerged from states like Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh of landlords evicting Kashmiri tenants and shopkeepers refusing to do business with them. Some Kashmiri students are stranded at airports, with no place to stay as they try to return home.
“Someone else committed the attack,” said Dar, “but we’re the ones paying the price.”
‘I See Mistrust Everywhere’
The long-disputed region of Kashmir — claimed entirely by both India and Pakistan but split between them — has once again become the epicentre of tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
After the deadly Pahalgam shooting, New Delhi accused Islamabad of enabling “cross-border terrorism.” Pakistan, in turn, denied involvement, saying it offers only moral and diplomatic backing to the Kashmiri cause. It also pointed out that India has yet to provide any concrete evidence linking it to the attack, which has intensified an already strained relationship. India has since suspended a key water-sharing pact, and both countries are expelling each other’s nationals and scaling down their diplomatic missions.
Yet the political fallout has left ordinary Kashmiris across India facing the harshest consequences.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, nearly a dozen Kashmiris — all requesting anonymity — said they’re now living in isolation across at least seven Indian cities. Many said they’ve locked themselves indoors, avoiding all outside contact, even refraining from using delivery services or ride-hailing apps.
Aasif Dar, a second-semester student studying anaesthesia and operation theatre technology in Jalandhar, is one of them. It’s his first time living outside Kashmir, and away from his family, to pursue higher education.
“There’s very little opportunity back home,” Dar said by phone. “I came here hoping to study hard and build a better life — maybe support my family someday.”
But things have taken a dark turn. With exams approaching, Dar says his mental health has deteriorated. “I can’t concentrate. Everything I studied over the past months feels like it’s disappeared. My thoughts are a mess — I don’t know whether I’ll even attend class tomorrow or head back home.”
“Everywhere I look, there’s suspicion,” he added. “It feels like a curse — our appearance instantly marks us as Kashmiris.”
Following the attack, some survivor accounts said the gunmen asked victims about their religion. Of the 26 killed, 25 were Hindu men. But lost in the wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Kashmiri sentiment that has surged across Indian social media was the story of the 26th victim — a Kashmiri Muslim who tried to protect the tourists from the attackers.
Sheikh Showkat, a Kashmiri political analyst and academic, said the current climate is a product of years of rising bigotry.
“India today is steeped in xenophobic, often Islamophobic, rhetoric,” he said. “Kashmiris carry a double burden — being both Kashmiri and Muslim. They’ve always been convenient scapegoats.”
‘Treat Kashmiri Muslims Like This’
Roughly 350km away from Jalandhar, in Dehradun, Uttarakhand’s capital, a far-right Hindu nationalist leader issued a threatening ultimatum on Tuesday.
“We won’t wait for the government,” declared Lalit Sharma of the Hindu Raksha Dal in a video. “Kashmiri Muslims must leave by 10am, or they will face consequences beyond imagination. Our members will take to the streets to teach them a lesson.”
The threat quickly spread across social media — and into the feed of *Mushtaq Wani, a 29-year-old Kashmiri master’s student in library science. As one of the older Kashmiris in Dehradun, he became a point of contact for many younger students who flooded him with worried calls.
“We took the threats very seriously,” said Wani, referencing past violence in the city. After the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing that killed over 40 Indian security personnel, Kashmiri students in Dehradun were attacked and expelled. Many never returned.
“This is the cycle we live in,” Wani said bitterly. “It keeps happening. Why can’t India eliminate the militants once and for all? They have the army, they have the numbers — but we pay the price every time.”
Since receiving the threats, Wani has helped around 15 students safely return to Kashmir. As for himself, he's holed up in a friend’s apartment, trying to study for term exams starting next week. “We’re still scared,” he said. “But missing exams would cost me everything.”
There was a slight sense of relief, Wani admitted, when police arrested Sharma and pledged to protect Kashmiri students from harm.
‘Pahalgam Changed It All’
Videos showing terrified Kashmiris — some being beaten — began circulating on social media after the Pahalgam attack. In response, Omar Abdullah, the recently elected chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, appealed to state leaders across India on X, asking them to safeguard Kashmiris.
“I urge the people of India not to treat Kashmiris as enemies,” Abdullah later told reporters. “What happened was not done with our approval. We are not to blame.”
Though Abdullah was elected last year in the region’s first assembly vote in a decade, his administration holds far less power than other Indian states. Since 2019, when the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s limited autonomy and split it into two federally governed territories, most authority lies with New Delhi.
For *Umer Parray, a pharmacy student from South Kashmir who’s lived in Jammu for five years, life was stable — until the Pahalgam shootings.
“Everything changed after Pahalgam,” he said. Before, he and his friends could go out for late-night ice cream. Now, he hasn’t stepped outside his home in a Kashmiri-majority neighborhood.
On the night of the attack, groups of young men roared through the area on motorbikes, blasting horns and shouting “Jai Shri Ram” — a Hindu religious slogan that far-right groups have weaponised in recent years.
A disturbing video soon emerged, showing Kashmiris being chased and beaten in a nearby street.
“I’ve never witnessed anything like this,” Parray said.
Beaten for being Kashmiri muslim, a Kashmiri student was thrashed by mob in Janipur, Jammu last night.
— Mubashir Naik (@sule_khaak) April 24, 2025
How long will we be criminalized for our identity? This is our home too.#Kashmir #Jammu #StopTargetingKashmiris pic.twitter.com/ubFagGIrwX
