By Jehangir Ali
Srinagar: For the last three to four years, Danish Ganai, a resident of the frontier Kupwara district in north Kashmir, has been making a living during winters by working as a Kashmiri shawl hawker in Uttarakhand. This year, his younger brother Tabish Rashid insisted on joining him to support their poor family. On Wednesday (January 28) evening, after going around hawking shawls in Himachal Pradesh’s holy town of Poanta Saheb, the two brothers were returning to their accommodation in Uttarakhand and had stopped for a quick bite at a shop in the outskirts of the state’s Vikas Nagar.
Before a whack of the iron rod on his head left him unconscious, Rashid heard the assailant telling the shopkeeper: “They are Muslims. Let’s finish one first and deal with the other later.”
“The shopkeeper initially took offence because we were speaking in Kashmiri language. He said that Uttarakhand is not Kashmir. Then he pushed me and asked us to leave. As we stood up, he grabbed our sack of shawls and other items, and flung it out on the road,” he told The Wire over phone.
They got into an argument with the shopkeeper, saying they had not committed any wrong to deserve the “humiliation”.
“He took out a baton and started beating my brother outside the shop. When I tried to rescue him, another man appeared on the scene with an iron rod. He was speaking as if being a Muslim and a Kashmiri was a crime. He pushed me towards one side and smacked my head after which I passed out,” Rashid said.
Mohd Shafiq, also a Kupwara resident, who has been attending to the brothers in Uttarakhand’s Vikas Nagar, confirmed that they were beaten up by the shopkeeper and his associate. He praised some local Hindu men and women for intervening in the matter and saving the two men.
While Rashid suffered grievous injuries including a fracture in the arm, his elder brother escaped with minor wounds on his leg. “There are eight to ten sutures on his (Tabish’s) head,” Shafiq said.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
