How a deadly car bombing is leading to dangerous backlash against Kashmiris

Even in metropolitan Delhi, often derided for its out-of-touch intelligentsia, Kashmiris who identify as Indian first are fearing for their futures

It was the deadliest single attack in three decades of guerrilla conflict. Now, people of Kashmiri origin living and working across India are watching with growing terror as a car bombing back home in the far north threatens to turn their lives upside down.

Last Thursday’s attack was months in the planning, officials believe, but unfolded in moments. A car bomber who had sworn allegiance to a Pakistan-based militant group was able to overtake the back of a convoy carrying 2,500 Indian soldiers and detonate a jerrycan full of explosives.

In one massive explosion so large that pieces of an armoured bus were thrown more than a kilometre from the road, 40 paramilitary officers were killed and dozens more injured.

It is hard to overstate how much the attack has dominated the news agenda in the four days since. Even in rural Uttarakhand, where I was travelling at the weekend, “the Pakistan terrorist attack in Kashmir” was the first topic on our taxi driver’s lips. India has a reputation for consumption of newspapers but few stories achieve such pervasive penetration.

Clearly, people have taken on board the Indian government’s stance that Pakistan is to blame for harbouring the militants behind the attack, despite Pakistan’s firm rejection that it was involved. Yet they have also noted that the bomber himself was a young Kashmiri man born and raised no more than six miles from the scene where he wrought such devastation.

Sure enough, reports of bigotry and hate-fuelled threats towards ordinary Kashmiri Muslims, usually from Hindus who make up the overwhelming majority, have sprung up across India in the past few days at an alarming rate.

Among the most high profile is the hounding out of hundreds of Kashmiri students from colleges and universities in the northern city of Dehradun. The dean of one college, himself a Kashmiri, was suspended on Saturday after a mob of Hindu nationalists demanded he be removed from his post.

In Panipat, Haryana, police were forced to step in after villagers marched on an engineering college shouting slogans demanding the expulsion of its 25 Kashmiri students, according to the Indian Express newspaper.

Widely shared posts on Twitter, which are then also circulated on WhatsApp, have shown shops with signs reading “Dogs allowed – but Kashmiri not allowed”. A video viewed hundreds of thousands of times purports to show Kashmiri traders being beaten with sticks in Bihar.

Perhaps most alarmingly, posts making wild and spurious generalisations about Kashmiris, or explicitly endorsing a boycott on Kashmir, have been made by some high profile and influential individuals. These include figures with close links to the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party of prime minister Narendra Modi.

One, the BJP-supporting academic Madhu Purnima Kishwar, wrote to her 2 million Twitter followers that she believed “with confidence” that Kashmiri handicraft shops in five-star hotels were fronts for jihadist groups.

Tathagata Roy, the BJP governor of Meghalaya state, said he was “inclined to agree” with a boycott of “everything Kashmiri”, including the “Kashmiri tradesmen who come every winter”.

Even in metropolitan Delhi, often derided for its out-of-touch intelligentsia, Kashmiris who identify as Indian first are fearing for their futures.

A Kashmiri doctor friend who works at one of the city’s top hospitals told me they fear a repeat of the anti-Sikh pogrom witnessed by the capital in the aftermath of the 1984 assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi, when more than 8,000 were killed in four days of bloodshed.

He describes how, since Thursday’s attack, he can feel the menace in the air. Rooms fall silent when he enters, he says, and for the first time in his life he is being made to feel like an outsider in the city he has made his home.

He is considering moving away for his family’s sake. He says that, unlike the Sikhs, there are just a few thousand Kashmiris among Delhi’s population of 20 million. If the mood turns any further, it would take a matter of hours to wipe them out, he says.

With an election looming and Modi’s reputation as a strong leader at stake, the Indian government has focused almost entirely in its response to the attack on Pakistan’s role – how it must do more to stop militant groups from operating within its borders, and even suggesting that Pakistan’s spy agency was “controlling” the group in question.

It has called for unity in the face of what it describes as its neighbour’s attempts to sow division.

But what has been absent is any firm message of communal cohesion, as – for instance – was issued by then-prime minister Manmohan Singh in 2008 when Muslims were threatened in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks.

Internationally, all the attention has been on the escalating rhetoric between India and Pakistan at a diplomatic level – the pair have fought three wars over Kashmir, after all, though not on a large scale since 1971.

Yet domestically, there is at least as much concern that rising anti-Kashmiri sentiment will spill over and see the country turn on itself. If he is to prove himself worthy of re-election in a few months’ time, Modi’s job must be to keep all of his citizens safe – Kashmiris included.